Gulag Voices (8 page)

Evening. Autumn. The birches are shedding their leaves. A lemon-yellow sunset burns through half the sky. Against that yellow light an enormous legion of crows flies, agitated and noisy. They caw as they rise, circle, and again land on the roofs around us. Black against yellow light. Against a windowless barrack wall stand the black figures of the old women. They are crossing themselves in unison, and in unison bowing from the waist, lifting their eyes to the brightly lit sky. The flock of crows circles and circles above them. The birches drop the last of their yellow leaves. Silence.

Another picture. A sunny morning, before reveille (we were allowed to relieve ourselves before the general wake-up call), I went out to the birch grove, hoping to have some time to myself. The dew was still on the grass, and a slight fog hung over the woods. Martins were flitting back and forth, preoccupied with the morning feeding of their chicks. I walked along, admiring the green shadows cast by the birches. Suddenly, from beyond one birch I heard a tearful and anxious whisper:

“Dost thou see? Dost thou see the suffering of all? Have pity, Lord. The world’s suffering is without measure, but extend thy hand, and give it comfort … In tears I pray to thee and implore thee, for all the people, Lord!”

Trying to keep out of sight, I stepped around to see who it was. There was Annushka, standing upright, her tear-streaked face uplifted, her arms clenched to her breast. She didn’t notice me, wouldn’t have noticed anyone, so immersed was she in her passionate and exacting prayer for the salvation of the world.

I tiptoed away. As I was nearing the barracks, reveille sounded. Suddenly I came upon Katya Golovanova walking up the path, dressed in her best clothes.

“Katya, where are you going?”

“To our church in the birches, so that I’ll have time to pray before everyone gets up.”

“Annushka’s out there, praying, crying …”

“Ah well, God be with her. I won’t get in her way. I’ll go someplace else.”

She made a turn at the bathhouse.

1
. In the 1920s and 1930s Trotskyites were systematically arrested and sent to the Gulag. The letter referred to here was written by Lenin at the end of his life warning the Party against the machinations of Stalin.

2
. In tsarist Russia, political prisoners had special rights not granted to criminal prisoners. In the early years of the Soviet Union the Bolsheviks also granted these rights to their political opponents, but Stalin took them away.

3
. An individual camp unit. There could be dozens, even hundreds, of lagpunkts within a single camp system.

4
. The local prison was named after one of the first Magadan commanders.

5
. The independent states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, along with territories that had previously been part of Poland, were annexed to the Soviet Union following World War II. The Polish territories became known as Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.

6
. Stepan Bandera (1909–59) was a Ukrainian nationalist leader who led a powerful anti-Soviet partisan movement during World War II.

7
. The Old Believers are a Russian Orthodox sect that split away from the church in the seventeenth century as a protest against liturgical reform. The writer Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky (1818–83) described life in the Russian provinces and among the Old Believers.

8
. Uniates, also called “Greek Catholics,” are an Eastern branch of Catholicism. Although they follow the Western pope, their rites and liturgy have more in common with Orthodoxy. The Subbotniki are a Russian Christian sect that follows many of the tenets of Judaism, including keeping the Sabbath on Saturday.

7.

ISAAK FILSHTINSKY

B
efore he published his 1994 Gulag memoir
We March Under Guard,
Isaak Filshtinsky was better known for a different sort of writing. Born in 1918, Filshtinsky was an expert on Arab culture and literature. The author of dozens of books and articles, he was also a popular teacher at Moscow State University. Yet as a young academic he had been arrested along with many other experts in Arab and Middle Eastern cultures as a “counter-revolutionary” and potential spy. He spent six years in Kargopollag, in northern Russia, from 1949 to 1955. After his return home he developed links to the nascent Russian human rights movement, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s he was subjected to occasional searches and police interrogations. At one point, he was fired from his job.

In 1989, after the fall of the Soviet Union, he began to write an account of his camp experiences. Though not as widely known in Russia as some other memoirs, Filshtinsky’s book is admired both for its high literary quality and for the author’s lack of anger and resentment: his writing has a cool, distanced tone, as if it concerned the ancient Arabs whose history he knew so well, rather than his own experiences.

In the selection that follows, Filshtinsky describes a young woman, a commercial artist, whose personality is profoundly changed by her camp experience. Sensitive and frightened when he first meets her, she becomes coarse and vulgar over time. She also makes the extraordinary but not altogether uncommon transformation from prisoner to guard.

Unlike the guards in German concentration camps, Gulag guards were not considered racially superior to the prisoners, whose ethnicity they often shared. There were, for example, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian prisoners in the camps after World War II, as well as a large number of Ukrainian guards.

Nor did the guards and prisoners inhabit distinct social spheres. Some guards had elaborate black-market dealings with prisoners. Some got drunk with prisoners. Many “cohabited” with prisoners (to use the Gulag’s euphemism for sexual relations), and others employed them as unpaid servants. Many were former prisoners themselves: prisoners who were willing to collaborate, to serve as informers, and sometimes to use bribery could “graduate” to the status of guards—and some went even higher. Probably the most famous beneficiary of this system was Naftaly Frenkel, the prisoner who designed the Gulag’s ration system in the 1920s, but there were others—among them, clearly, the woman in Filshtinsky’s story.

Promotion

I met her purely by accident. One fairly warm autumn morning our crew was led out but for once was not marched directly to the sawmill; instead, they halted us at the guardhouse at the entrance to the women’s compound. Back then some camps were still holding to their wartime and postwar routines; the ban on any contact between male and female prisoners was not yet strictly enforced. When additional bodies were needed to bolster the workforce, the camp administration was in no hurry to follow the new rules to the letter; female crews were often sent out with the men’s. So a small group of women joined our brigade. The two groups mixed and moved out in a single column. The women’s crew consisted almost entirely of old hands, felons. All had some acquaintances among the male prisoners and felt themselves right at home.

She was darting fearful glances from side to side, backward and forward. The grim faces, the look of men long starved for a woman, their avaricious, searching eyes, their frank and predatory scrutiny of the new arrivals, their scabrous jokes would have frightened anyone. Their dress only added to the picture: ragged footwear, mangy lop-eared fur hats worn summer and winter, years on end. Filthy padded jackets and vests with tufts of singed cotton wadding sticking out of numerous holes. Work in the forest always meant working around campfires; sparks fell onto the jackets, and the cotton stuffing could smolder for hours, leaving holes with burnt edges and umber stains bleeding into the cloth.

The crew’s resident joker, a
mora
—the general camp term for a Gypsy—sensed her fear. Dark eyes flashing, he slowly wove his way through the crowd, his fur hat angled down onto his forehead so that one earflap string dangled over one eye, all the better to frighten her.

In those days I was still “quarantined,” in a zone within the zone. I had arrived only ten days earlier and had not yet been issued prison garb. I was still wearing the military overcoat and officer’s cap that I had worn throughout all those months at Lubianka and Lefortovo. So my appearance was noticeably different from that of the longtime prisoners; this apparently prompted the young woman to wade through the crowd and seek me out. I met her timid, frightened gaze, and moving closer, asked, “Just in?”

“Yesterday, prison detail.”

“Where from ?”

“Moscow: Malaia Lubianka, then Butyrka.”
1

“Article 58?”

“Yes, 58.10, five years.”

Our column moved out, she and I marching side by side, and the woman told me her story, a fairly common one for those days. She was twenty-six, a commercial artist, had designed some exhibits, was married, and had a child—a three-year-old son. At Butyrka the interrogator told her that shortly after her arrest her husband had filed for divorce and that her mother-in-law would be rearing the boy. She had heard nothing of the child since. She’d been arrested for saying something or other to a fellow artist, who duly informed the “proper authorities.” Moreover, in 1937 her father, the manager of an “elite cafeteria,”
2
had been arrested; he was accused of attempting to poison some higher-ups, who themselves were later arrested and shot. By that time the girl too was ripe for arrest, and it was easy enough to pin the same accusations on her : “enemy of the people,” “terrorist intentions.” But her interrogator proved to be both sympathetic and kind, and instead charged her with “anti-Soviet agitation.” A mere five years.

“My interrogator was a real savior,” said my new acquaintance. “He explained that if I admitted to the conversation with my girlfriend, the terrorism charge would be dropped and I wouldn’t be shot.”

“Oh aren’t these interrogators the kindest of men,” I thought. But I couldn’t bring myself to disillusion her. Once she’d landed in prison, there was no way she could have avoided a stretch in the camps.

All the way to the work site, and against all rules, the woman clung to my arm, darting fearful glances in every direction. Fortunately, the road to the sawmill was not that long, and the guard detail more or less ignored us. Once we got to the yard, the women were separated from the men and set to work stacking sawn boards, with a single guard to keep order.

When at the end of the day the crews began to form up at the guardhouse, waiting to be escorted back to their barracks, my new friend searched me out in the crowd and grabbed my arm. The thugs around us hooted encouragement: “Hey, he just got here, and look, he’s already got a babe …”

On that first day of work my new friend had had a graphic lesson in camp morals. Barely ten minutes passed before first one then another woman began to slip away, to emerge ten or fifteen minutes later from behind the stacks, having received her ration of male love from one or another sawmill worker. Once back with her crew, the seeker of earthly delights would share her experience with her comrades, sparing no detail, however intimate. Some of the women would venture behind the stacks a number of times because, as they put it, “When’s the next time you’ll get to some man’s …?” They complained about the sad and lonely lot of the female prisoner. My friend’s account was agitated, confused.

I have to say that my own lot was hardly an easy one. Months of harsh interrogation at Lubianka and Lefortovo had taken their toll, and by the end of one day in the sorting yard (we called it the sporting yard) where from seven in the morning until six at night we were unloading six-meter [twenty-foot] long boards (“fifties” and “inchers”) off a never-ending conveyor, stacking them by grade onto the sledges, I could barely put one foot in front of the other. I was hardly inclined to play the role of the gallant and fearless protector of women and the oppressed, but nonetheless during that week and a half when the women’s brigade was marched with us to the sawmill, I dutifully walked there and back in close company with my lady, and patiently listened to tales from her former life: the childhood that by her lights had been absolutely wonderful, the husband who had abandoned her, the child she had left behind, her life among the women convicts, her sufferings amid the cynicism and vice that surrounded her.

Prisons and camps threw people together into a cell or a compound and just as abruptly, at the whim of the interrogators and the administration, tore them apart. Cellmates, campmates often never saw each other again. So I was not at all surprised when my chance acquaintance’s brigade suddenly disappeared from sawmill detail, or when the women’s compound next to our lagpunkt was suddenly shut down. The women were being transferred to other units, to logging camps strung ten kilometers [six miles] along the branch line. And as usual, when someone got lost in the murky flow of camp comings and goings, we forgot that we’d ever met him. Her too.

Our joyless life in the camps dragged on, and then one day, about three years after my first meeting with my accidental friend, my brigade was being marched back from our work site to the main compound. It was a fairly warm summer day for the far North. At that time of year dusk came late; at six or seven o’clock the sun was still high and bright. Our way back led over a railroad crossing, and there at the crossing gate I saw a solitary female figure. Judging by her outward appearance, she had to be an unsupervised worker. The camp administration always had need of convicts who could work independently—for example, when logs were being hauled out of the woods and there was a one-person job to be done at a rail stop. This sort of work was assigned either to those serving light sentences or long-term prisoners who had already served most of their time. They were issued a pass that allowed them to travel unsupervised outside the zone, but only during certain hours and only along a strictly defined route. This was a privileged group. They could make a little extra money; they could buy provisions—including liquor—out in the world. If artful enough, they could have a “private life.”

The woman at the crossing gate was dressed in a new prison jacket neatly tailored to her figure: it also sported a nattily upturned collar. Instead of the traditional prison-camp bonnet sewn of trouser material, she wore a beret, and shoes rather than prison-issue boots. I might not have paid much attention had it not been for one little punk in our ranks, dressed in an equally natty red shirt, who shouted out her name. The woman yelled back, and the two struck up a standard camp exchange laced with criminal argot, obscenities, and pseudo sweet-nothings. It was clear from this short conversation that the two had been lovers, but the man had been yanked back into custody for falling afoul of camp regulations. The woman swore that one day soon she would manage to get to the sawmill, where they could find a suitable hideaway for their next tryst. This exchange, amply peppered with salacious quips, testified to the woman’s long and close acquaintance with the criminal world of the camps. During our short wait at the crossing the guard detail also played a lively part in the conversation, adding a little spice and edge by offering to set up a lovers’ rendezvous in the cooler. They seemed to like the game, the chance to swear and blow off steam.

I took a closer look, and recognized my old friend the artist. She had gone to fat. Her face had coarsened. Her eyebrows, as Gulag fashion dictated, were plucked bare, then penciled in. Her cheeks were plastered with a thick layer of cerise and rouge. Her uneasy gaze darted back and forth, then skittered over our column. Our eyes met. She fell silent, and underneath the cerise and the rouge her cheeks reddened. She stayed absolutely silent for a few seconds, then fired another long round of abuse at her suitor, turned on her heel, and strode—almost ran—away. We moved out; she disappeared from view.

Two more years passed. By this time I was working as an inspector and was now also a trusty.
3
One of my jobs was to provide local residents with waste wood to heat their houses: most of them were camp staff, some civilians, some free workers, some officers and guards on second or third tours, quartered in the village.

One day a middle-aged man showed up at the yard with a requisition for a truckload of firewood. We struck up a conversation. It turned out that he was a railroad engineer, a former convict (class of 1937) who was still banned from leaving the district in which his camp was located. He was doing work for hire, laying track that was to branch off from the Moscow-Vorkuta main line deep into Arkhangelsk Oblast as new swathes were cut and new lagpunkts established. He asked about my background, and after learning that before the war I had taken part in a few archaeological expeditions, wondered whether I knew anything about surveying. I knew less than nothing, but the temptation to change my lot in life was so strong that the longtime prisoner’s reflex kicked in. Of course I knew the trade. No problem.

“We need a surveyor, someone who can travel unguarded, to plot the route. I’ll try to get you reclassified,” he said.

The stranger turned out to be a man of his word, and six months later I was issued a pass. But the mill bosses were reluctant to let someone who had already mastered
their
trade go off and build a railroad, and they kept me at the lumber yard. Nonetheless, at least now I was officially allowed to travel alone.

Later, after yet another screwup loading logs onto flatbeds, the yard boss, a civilian, sent me to the freight office to sort things out. I stepped through the door—and jumped. There behind an imposing desk sat (or rather, presided) my old acquaintance. To me, an old-timer by now, she looked to be dressed in the height of city fashion. At least that’s how my perhaps ignorant eye took in her saucepan-shaped hat and knee-length skirt. She was berating her convict-dispatcher for sending railcars to the wrong cutting site.