Kolyma Tales (2 page)

In 1931 a Soviet trust bearing the name Far Northern Construction was established to take charge of all forced-labor projects in north-eastern Siberia. With headquarters in the city of Magadan, Far Northern controlled all of Kolyma, an enormous natural prison bounded by the Pacific on the east, the Arctic Circle on the north and impassable mountains on the third side of the triangle. Gradually Far Northern increased its jurisdiction westward toward the Lena River and southward to the Aldan – a territory four times the size of France. Its domain may even have extended as far west as the Yenisei River. If this is true, Far Northern’s authority would have extended over a territory as large as all of Western Europe.

Reingold Berzin, a Latvian communist, was in charge of the trust from 1932 to 1937. During this period conditions are reported to have been relatively tolerable: prisoners received adequate food and clothing, were given manageable work assignments and could shorten their sentences by hard work. In 1937 Berzin, his deputy I. G. Filippov and a number of others were arrested and shot as Japanese spies. Management of Far Northern was handed over to K. A. Pavlov and a pathological murderer, Major Garanin (who himself was executed in 1939). The changes in leadership were signaled by Stalin in a 1937 speech in which he criticized the ‘coddling’ of prisoners.

Under Pavlov and Garanin food rations were reduced to the point where most prisoners could not hope to survive: clothing and rations were insufficient for the harsh climate, and prisoners were sent to work in temperatures as cold as – 60°F.

The camps were arranged in a hierarchy that provided virtually unlimited power and privilege for the senior bureaucrats. At the bottom of the non-convict pecking order were soldiers and former convicts who had been released but were not allowed to leave. Their living conditions were only slightly better than those of the prisoners.

Whenever possible, common criminals received trustee positions. Accustomed to violence, they easily controlled the political prisoners, even though the latter outnumbered them. In general, one of the worst features of the camps was that political prisoners were constantly brutalized and murdered by professional criminals.

With the onset of the Second World War the official workday was extended from ten to twelve hours (although unofficially it was often sixteen), and the bread ration was cut to a little over one pound per day. When the war came to a close, conditions improved, and a general amnesty was declared immediately after Stalin’s death for all prisoners with less than a five-year sentence. Unfortunately, only common criminals had received such light sentences.

During the Khrushchev period the politicals were released and ‘rehabilitated’, meaning the government admitted that they had been innocent all along.

Several Soviet books on Kolyma were published in the pre-Gorbachev era. One is Viktor Urin’s
Along the Kolyma Highway to the Pole of Cold
, published in 1959. A sort of tourist’s notebook of travel impressions, the book has a number of pictures – including some of women in bathing suits – and the effect is somewhat similar to that of an early
National Geographic
. Urin intersperses his travel descriptions with his own poetry. Andrei Zimkin, whose 1963 volume
At the Headwaters of the Kolyma River
makes no mention of convicts, spent from 1933 to 1961 in Kolyma. It is not clear whether he himself was a convict or a civilian employee of the camps.

Varlam Shalamov’s story is, by contrast, all too clear. A priest’s son, he joined a group of youthful Trotskyites in 1927, when he was a twenty-year-old law student at Moscow University. In 1929 he was picked up in a police trap when he came to collect some illegally printed materials. He refused to testify at his trial, was sentenced to three years’ hard labor and was granted an early release in 1932; sentences were still comparatively mild at the time.

By then Shalamov had already begun to write both fiction and verse, although life in the camps was a topic he would take up only later. Disappointed by lack of support from his arrested friends, he decided to disengage himself from politics, but the net of state terror ensnared him, along with millions of others.

In 1937 he was rearrested and sentenced to five years’ hard labor for ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activities’. Retried in 1943 for having praised the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin and called him a ‘classic Russian writer’, he was condemned to remain in the camps until the end of the war. Curiously, the new sentence turned out to be a blessing in disguise. His crime of ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ was viewed as trivial compared to the former ‘Trotskyite activities’. Until then he had been held in a virtual death camp, where – at nearly six feet tall – his weight had dropped to 90 pounds. With the new sentence he was transferred to a prison hospital and managed to regain his weight. Gold mining once more emaciated him, and he was returned to the hospital. After that he was sent to a logging camp where the convicts were simply not fed if they did not fulfill their work norms. Captured during an escape attempt, he was dispatched to a penal zone where, if they could not work, prisoners were thrown off a mountain or tied to a horse and dragged to their deaths. Chance came to his aid when a group of Italian prisoners were delivered to the site, replacing the Soviet convicts. It was at that point that a physician took an interest in him and managed to have him assigned to paramedical courses – a second fortunate twist of fate that literally saved his life.

In 1951 Shalamov was released from the camps, and in 1953 he was permitted to leave Magadan, though not to reside in a large city. It was after this, his final release, that he began to write
Kolyma Tales
. On 18 July 1956 he was formally ‘rehabilitated’ by the Soviet government and permitted to return to Moscow, where he worked as a journalist and, in 1961, began publishing his poetry. In all, he published five slender collections. Shalamov’s verse is intimately bound up with his experiences in Kolyma, a circumstance that could not be mentioned at the time in the collections themselves. But his true talent was as a prose writer, and his poetry did not bring him the recognition he had hoped for.

The manuscript of
Kolyma Tales
was brought to the United States in 1966 by Professor Clarence Brown of Princeton University. From 1970 to 1976 Roman Goul, editor of the New York Russian
émigré
quarterly the
New Review
, published one or two of the
Kolyma Tales
in most issues of his journal. Others appeared in the
émigré
journal
Grani
, published in Frankfurt-am-Main. The full Russian language version did not appear until 1978, when it was brought out by Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd in London. To protect Shalamov from reprisals the editors always placed a note to the effect that the stories were being published without the knowledge and consent of the author.

Although Shalamov had, in fact, consented to publication, he became angry with Goul for editing the stories and for failing to publish a separate collection. On the pages of
Literaturnaya gazeta
Shalamov published a statement claiming that the topic of
Kolyma Tales
was no longer relevant after Khrushchev’s famous de-Stalinization speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, that he had never sent any manuscript abroad for publication and that he was a loyal Soviet citizen. He inveighed against everyone previously involved in the publication of his stories in the West, shocking his former admirers so deeply that some literally removed his portrait from their homes. But even having betrayed his own major achievement,
Kolyma Tales
, he continued to write them.

Shalamov’s stories are in the Chekhovian tradition, though they depict a far more savage era. A brief plot is devoted to one incident; an objective, dispassionate narration provides a contrast to the horror of the moment; and a
pointe
ends it. As Chekhov was compared with Tolstoy, so Shalamov has his counterpart: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The parallels go beyond brevity versus amplitude. Chekhov, a writer who respected the rights of the reader in the artistic process, consciously avoided drawing conclusions for his audience. Tolstoy, on the other hand (like Solzhenitsyn later), constantly lectures the reader.

By his own admission, Solzhenitsyn barely touches on Kolyma in his writings. He asked Shalamov to co-author his
Gulag Archipelago
with him, but Shalamov, already old and sick, declined. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn writes: ‘Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own, and I respectfully confess that to him and not me was it given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all.’

The British Slavist Geoffrey Hosking summed up the differences between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn well:

Central to any discussion of Shalamov’s writing is the subject of genre. We have here a literary form attempting to bridge the gap between fact and fiction – something like the historical novel. Shalamov’s stories represent a fusion of art and life, and it is not possible to separate aesthetic evaluation from historical appraisal. While the stories should not be accepted as precise factual accounts, it is important to realize that the overwhelming majority of them are autobiographical in nature.

In ‘My First Tooth’ Shalamov describes how he himself was beaten during his first sentence for speaking up for a member of a religious sect; his tooth was knocked out, and he was made to stand naked in the cold. ‘The Lawyers’ Plot’ describes what was to have been his own execution; he was saved by a bloody shake-up among the political bosses. Merzlakov’s attempt to feign paralysis in ‘Shock Therapy’ is a case that he personally witnessed. He saw the bodies dug from the ground by the American bulldozer in ‘Lend-Lease’, and ‘Condensed Milk’ describes how another convict tried to lure him into an escape attempt so as to be able to betray him to camp authorities. His correspondence with ‘Fleming’ in ‘The Used-Book Dealer’ is part of his personal archive, and ‘The Train’ describes his own attempt to return home. ‘A Pushover Job’, ‘Carpenters’, ‘Dry Rations’, ‘Sententious’, ‘Quiet’, ‘On Tick’, ‘A Piece of Meat’, ‘The Snake Charmer’, ‘Chief of Political Control’, ‘A Child’s Drawings’, ‘Magic’ and ‘Esperanto’ are all taken from his personal experience; ‘Major Pugachov’s Last Battle’, on the other hand, was not taken from his own life, although it is partly based on historical fact.

In the late 1970s Shalamov’s health began to fail. In 1979 the Literary Fund (the department of the Writers’ Union that oversaw questions of residence, pensions and the like) managed to have him placed in an old people’s home, where he lost his vision and hearing. The degree to which he was able to comprehend what was happening around him is unclear.

On 17 January 1982 I gave a talk on Shalamov’s life and work for the Greater Washington, DC chapter of the Russian Literary Fund. It was the coldest day in the city’s history – as if Kolyma had come to Washington – and only a handful of devoted admirers braved the weather. We did not know it at the time, but Shalamov had died that very day.

When I learned the news I called the Moscow offices of the Soviet Writers’ Union, which refused to provide any information other than the fact that Shalamov had died and been buried. Later I received photographs of the funeral and learned that two days earlier he had been transferred from one old people’s home to another and had not survived the move.

In late fall of 1987 I met with Sergey Zalygin, editor-in-chief of Russia’s most renowned magazine,
Novy mir
. Zalygin spoke with great optimism about reform in the Soviet Union. I countered that
Kolyma Tales
still could not be published. He seemed genuinely intrigued by my comment and promised to give the matter serious consideration; before a year had passed he brought out a selection of the
Kolyma Tales
in his magazine.

In 1989, for the first time in sixteen years, I was issued a visa to visit the Soviet Union. As I crossed a street, using one of Moscow’s broad underground passageways, I saw a long line of people queuing up. Since consumer goods are scarce in today’s Russia and queues are a part of life, I was about to walk past without taking any notice until I saw that it was not oranges or shampoo being sold but…
Kolyma Tales
. The man standing at the head of the line purchased three copies. The woman standing behind him bought six.

I wish to express my deep gratitude to Abraham Brumberg, Diana Glad, Leonard Meyers, Karen McDermott, Cynthia Rosenberger, Emily Tall and Josephine Woll for their help in preparing this volume.