Gulag Voices (7 page)

The taiga was beautiful in those early morning hours. Close to the camp it was hacked, mutilated. Stumps jutted out of the ground; blackened, half-burned waste wood lay everywhere. Great yellow sandpits. But once we left the clear-cut we would come into virgin taiga, where the pines, each more choice than the next, towered like a wall of bronze. The sun had just risen. Great drops of dew shone on the blue rails and the grayish ties, and the tops of the pines were golden in the sun. Cool, fair, clear everywhere. Chipmunks occasionally scurried across our path—a sign of good luck. It was easy walking along the railway tracks, feeling the weight of the sledgehammer on our shoulders, the polished handle smoothed by our rough hands. A good mood, a lively mood, and I would drift away …

And suddenly instead of a hammer I was carrying a rifle. And all of Siberia was burning; the camps were in revolt. And we were not a work crew, we were a platoon led by a seasoned officer, Sergei Zakharchenko. And we were going to free our comrades. Just around the corner was Camp No. 6, and shots would ring out …

“Citizen boss, stop here.”

Zakharchenko’s voice would bring me back to reality.

“We need to stop here.”

We’d stop for half an hour. We’d replace a rotten tie, drive in some spikes, and head on down the line. We’d scramble over skid roads, up and down gullies and embankments, over wooden bridges with hardwood supports. And around every turn, over every rise, one far vista after another would unfold—the endless reaches of the taiga, shades of blue, purple, and smoky green.

1
. Possibly sulfa.

2
. Prison slang for a self-inflicted wound.

3
. Soviet soldiers who collaborated with German forces during World War II.

6.

NINA GAGEN-TORN

P
erhaps because she was an ethnographer by profession, Nina Gagen-Torn’s descriptions of her fellow Gulag inmates have an unusual sharpness. Born in Saint Petersburg in 1900, Gagen-Torn was the daughter of a respected physician, a Russified Swede. This fact may have saved her life: upon her arrival at one camp, a doctor inspecting the prisoners asked her whether her father was Ivan Gagen-Torn, his former professor. When she said yes, he immediately declared that she was “ill,” plucked her out of the brigade of women being marched off to work, and sent her to rest in the camp hospital.

Arrested in 1936, Gagen-Torn served two terms in the Gulag, from 1936 to 1942 in Kolyma, and from 1947 to 1952 in Mordovia. Such double arrests were common: anyone who had already served a prison term for a political crime remained suspicious, and when repressive measures were tightened in 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War, hundreds of thousands of freed prisoners found themselves once again behind barbed wire. Gagen-Torn thus spent twelve years in prison camps. During that time she composed dozens of verses, some of which were subsequently published. In the camps, she was known as a poet. Outside the camps, she was a respected ethnographer and historian.

The selection that follows is from Gagen-Torn’s memoirs,
Memoria,
published in 1995, and comes from her second, postwar camp term. It shows both her poetic and her ethnographic talents to good effect. Gagen-Torn describes the phenomenon of faith in the camps—not only religious faith but faith in communism and faith in nationalism as well. Gagen-Torn herself was not a believer and thus treats the subject dispassionately. But deep religious, political, or patriotic belief was a source of strength for many in the camps. In a world in which so much seemed arbitrary, faith of various kinds gave inmates a reason to stay alive. Religious and national communities stuck together in the camps and members helped one another obtain better jobs and food. Many prisoners have written about the need they felt during their years in the camps to have some kind of goal, something which would make sense of their otherwise nonsensical experience: faith could provide such a purpose.

On Faith

In this chapter I would like to write about those people who believed—those who, thanks to their faith, were never broken.

First of all there were the “Lenin loyalists,” as they called themselves when I first encountered them in Kolyma. They readily acknowledged their ties to the Trotskyite opposition, and unfailingly pressed their demands. First among these was the publication of Lenin’s deathbed letter, which Stalin had suppressed, thereby violating the principle of democracy within the Party.
1

They believed that Stalin had turned the dictatorship
of
the proletariat into a dictatorship
over
the proletariat, that he had set a reign of terror in motion, that collectivization carried out by force and the wholesale enslavement of the peasantry had not advanced the cause of socialism, that the tactics of the Party as led by Stalin discredited the very idea of communism.

Only the blood of the Communist martyrs willing to do battle with the Stalinist line could save the Communist ideal. The Lenin loyalists were willing martyrs. They were driven through the streets of Vladivostok on their way from exile to the Kolyma camps, roughly a hundred of them, singing as they marched: “You fell victim to the fateful strife / to undying love for the people.” The guards beat them with rifle butts, but the singing never stopped. They were herded into the ship’s hold, but even from there the songs resounded. On landing in Kolyma, they declared a hunger strike and demanded “political conditions,” which meant the right to send and receive letters, to read, and to be housed separately from the common criminals.
2
On the fifteenth day of the strike the prison authorities began to force-feed them. The prisoners resisted. On the ninetieth day the administration promised to meet their demands. The hunger strike ended. With the promise of a change in conditions they were split up and assigned to a number of different lagpunkts.
3
But later, gradually, all were brought back to Magadan and sent to the fearsome prison nicknamed “Vaskov’s House.”
4
New charges were brought. They knew that they would be shot, but again they went willingly. These were courageous people. No doubt all of them perished, but all had kept their faith, doing battle for communism as they understood it.

Other keepers of the faith were the nationalists from the newly annexed republics: the Baltics and Western Ukraine.
5
Although there were quite a few true activists in the camps, I rarely ran into them. At Lagpunkt No. 10, guards frisking a group of young Lithuanian women found pamphlets: songs in Lithuanian decorated by a vignette depicting an oak branch with acorns, a symbol of Lithuanian independence. The barracks were rife with whispers: “Found them out … celebrate Lithuania Day … confiscated everything … taken away … security tighter … no paper anymore … what will happen to those girls? New charges … poor things … high price.”

Once I did meet a Ukrainian nationalist, a spare, thin woman with a burning gaze who refused to speak anything other than Ukrainian, and only with other Ukrainians. Given the number of Ukrainians in the camps, this wasn’t particularly unusual. What made people notice her was her passion and intensity. It was clear that she was uninterested in food or everyday survival; it was clear that not for an instant did she ever forget that she was in enemy captivity. There came a day when she decided to demonstrate this.

It was a weekend. We were all preoccupied with our own affairs: mending, sewing, straightening our bunks. A low hum hung over the barracks.

A ringing voice suddenly cut through the hum.

“Ladies!” she shouted from the middle of the hut. “Today is the birthday of Stepan Bandera!
6
Long live Stepan!
Khai zhive Pan Stepan!
”

A hush fell. Heads popped down from the upper bunks.

“
Khai zhive Pan Stepan! Khai zhive Nenko Ukraina!
” she shouted even louder. No response. She waved one hand in disgust and ran out. A few hours later she was marched off to the cooler … Where they shipped her next I don’t know.

More visible, and more noticeable, were the various religious faiths. At times there was a tragic aura about these groups; at times they seemed merely grotesque. I have already described the nuns of Lagpunkt No. 6. At Lagpunkt No. 10 the Sisters were herded into a single barrack and forbidden contact with other prisoners. They themselves never sought any. At certain hours of the day hymns sounded from their barrack; otherwise silence reigned. Their steadfastness became abundantly clear when one very ill woman was called in: “You’re being processed out. Pick up your documents, shove off home.”

She calmly looked at them and said, “I do not recognize your authority. Your state is unholy, your passport bears the stamp of the Antichrist. I want none of it. Once I am freed you will just jail me again. Why should I leave?” She turned on her heel and headed back to the barracks. In her mind she was free; only her body was captive.

How did the women on work detail regard the nuns? Many carped at them: “We work—they don’t! But they still get their bread! All our work … fine bunch of saints they are!” Others took a neutral stance—“not our business.” Yet others handed them alms on the sly. They would tuck a package into the hem of a skirt and sneak into the nuns’ hut, or would beckon one of them around a corner. Bowing low, they would say, “Take this, Sisters, in Christ’s name … it’s from home, not here …” The Sister would bow low in reply: “Christ be with you.” And she would hide it in turn.

The Sisters were staunch in their observance, Old Believers whose traditions and conduct had been forged over centuries. It was as if we were in the presence of the old faith depicted more profoundly than Melnikov-Pechersky ever could.
7

The range of religious beliefs was astonishing. Each version of each faith had its true believers and a set of hangers-on. In the summertime you could see them all in the corner of the camp we called the “park.” Every birch tree was a chapel of sorts.

Between seven and eight in the morning, the guards’ vigilance dulled a bit: breakfast was over, work details were being assigned, barracks were searched and inspected, the shift was about to change. They had their hands full.

The very time for morning prayer in the park.

The Russian Orthodox gather under one tree. Under another stand the “westerners,” the Uniates. Then there are the Baptists and the Subbotniki.
8
Two Catholics find their own corner, and under the scornful gaze of the rest of the worshipers, begin praying in Latin. The Orthodox are singing the midday liturgy and the Uniates are saying, “That sounds like ours.” They too kneel, raise their hands, palms together in the Catholic fashion, and begin praying.

“That looks like us,” says Katya Golovanova, the head of the Russian Orthodox group. “Very much like us … but why bother to put your hands together? Then again everybody prays in their own way … we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord. Their singing is nice.”

Katya herself had a wonderful voice; she was a fine singer. The Uniates were happy that she liked their singing. The churches were coming together.

The Baptists did not approve of songs; they thought hymns or liturgies unnecessary. They would chant poetry, often improvising it. They had their own leader, Sister Annushka, who interpreted the Gospel for them. The Subbotniki would sit on a single bench, discussing religion.

It was not until the camps that I realized that the Subbotniki, the “Judaizing Christians” whom Ivan the Terrible had sought to destroy, still existed. This sect had outlived all the tsars. Its members regarded all tsars with contempt. They believed that the monarchy had conspired with the church to distort the word of God, had deceived the common folk by various designs, had renounced the only book given by God himself—the Old Testament. Their accusation: “In the Bible it is said—Remember the Sabbath day! But the lords and masters went and invented Sunday! A lie! And who wrote the Gospels? People wrote the Gospels. But the Bible comes from God. We must hold to the Bible: all the prophecies are there if you understand them rightly.”

The Subbotniki debated with the Baptists, whose tree stood nearby. Young women reared by the Komsomol would sometimes join in. “Girls, you’re talking foolishness!” they exhorted. “Some people have one God, others have another. But who’s ever laid eyes on any of them? Nobody. Telescopes have explored the sky, pilots have crisscrossed it—nobody’s seen a thing.”

“Daughters,” replied Sister Annushka. “God is a force unseen, like love. Can you feel love with your hands?”

“Of course,” the girls replied. “Love is visible through works. Anyone can see it. But here there’s so much injustice! How can God permit that, if he exists?”

Once I accidentally provided Sister Annushka with a very convincing argument. I had been talking about color blindness, about people who cannot tell green from red; their eyes are made that way, and they cannot see every color. Annushka’s face shone: “Now that’s what science can show us! So we see the world not in its essence, but only as much of it as has been revealed to us. Some see more, some see less. There are people who cannot tell green from red, and there are people who can see the unseeable! And you know, I’ve heard that there’s some kind of waves: sound waves, light waves—how does that work?”

I explained. This too was turned to some advantage in the debates—the news spread. The Subbotniki scurried up to ask whether it was true, then left, shaking their heads. In the barracks Katya Golovanova sidled up next to me and, straightening her white headscarf, quietly asked, “I heard that you were telling people about some sort of rays? They (by this she meant the Baptists) are twisting that their way.”

For several days the discussion went on, as representatives of the various churches left their separate birches to talk with one another. This could have taken a dangerous turn: the guards might notice people gathering. Those same young girls saved the day.

“Attention, ladies!” they shouted. “Guard!”

And instantly the “park” emptied. The believers scattered like a flock of sparrows scared by a cat, each group to its own birch tree.

However, I suspect that the guards knew about these gatherings. They preferred to pretend that they didn’t; it saved them the trouble of breaking them up.

Only one guard—small, quick, and overeager—was dangerous: for him, vigilance was all. He watched us, he drove us. But one time he outdid himself—pelted up to the guardhouse and announced: “There’s a new sect! I saw it myself, let’s go! They’re all sitting in a row and singing and one is dancing in front.” He led the senior duty officer over.

They were visible from a long way away, not in the park, but directly in front of the barracks: six or so old crones on a bench, singing a mournful tune. Opposite them was a tall, gray-haired woman flapping her arms high and doing squats. Every time she squatted her cropped gray locks flew upward like a fan. The guard blustered, “What’s going on here! Religious gathering!”

The old women stood and bowed: “Citizen boss! Citizen boss, please let us say …”

But the tall gray-haired woman shouted over them, “How dare you? How dare you accuse me of any sort of religious nonsense? I’ve been a Party member since 1905, I’ve agitated against religion all my life … and all my life I’ve been doing calisthenics every morning.”

“That’s true,” said the women. “She exercises every morning here. We just happened to sit down at the same spot, on our own.”

The duty officer shot his zealous subordinate a reproachful look.

The entire camp was chuckling as news spread of the new sect.

Sometimes the prayers seemed an ancient ritual emerging out of a very deep past. One picture sticks in my mind, but is difficult to put into words; if I could, I would paint it instead.