Kolyma Tales (42 page)

An unusually small number of persons had taken part in its organization, but it was precisely this aspect that guaranteed its success. The escape was also remarkable because in this land of Yakuts where local residents were promised twenty pounds of flour for each captured escapee, a single person had challenged a whole state with its thousands of armed men. Twenty pounds of flour had been the tariff in czarist times, and this reward was officially accepted even now. Krivoshei had to look on everyone as informers and cowards, but he had struggled and won!

What error had destroyed the plan that he had so brilliantly conceived and carried out?

His wife was detained in the north and had not been permitted to return to the mainland. The same organization that was investigating her husband was also in charge of issuing travel papers.

This, however, they had foreseen, and she was prepared to wait. Month followed month, and her request was refused without explanation. She made an attempt to leave from the other end of Kolyma – by plane over the same taiga rivers and valleys through which her husband passed on foot. But, of course, she was refused there as well. She was locked up in an enormous stone prison one-eighth the size of the Soviet Union, and she could not find a way out.

She was a woman, and she became weary of this eternal struggle with a person whose face she couldn’t see, a person who was stronger than she – stronger and more wily.

She had spent the money she had brought with her, and life in the north was expensive. At the Magadan bazaar one apple costs a hundred rubles. So she got a job, but the salaries of persons hired locally, and not ‘recruited’ on the mainland, differed little from those in Kharkov.

Her husband had often said to her: ‘Wars are won by strong nerves’, and during those sleepless white polar nights she would whisper to herself these words of a German general. She felt her nerves were giving out. The stillness of nature, the deaf wall of human indifference, her complete uncertainty and fear for her husband exhausted her. For all she knew, he might have died of hunger along the way. He could have been killed by other escaped convicts, or shot by the guards, but she joyously concluded from the constant attention to her person on the part of a certain Institution that her husband had not ‘been caught’ and that her sufferings would be justified.

She wanted to confide in someone, but who would understand her, advise her? She knew little of the Far North, and she ached to lighten that terrible burden on her soul that seemed to grow with every day, with every hour.

But in whom could she confide? In everyone she met she sensed a spy, an informer, an observer, and her intuition did not deceive her. All her acquaintances in all the settlements and towns of Kolyma had been called in and warned by the Institution. All of them waited anxiously for her to speak openly.

In the second year she made several attempts by mail to re-establish her contacts with her acquaintances in Kharkov. All her letters were copied and forwarded to the Kharkov Institution.

By the end of her second year of imprisonment, this desperate half-beggar knew only that her husband was alive. She sent letters addressed to him poste restante to all the major cities of the USSR.

In response she received a money order and after that five or six hundred rubles each month. Krivoshei was too clever to send the money from Mariupol, and the Institution was too experienced not to understand this. The map used in such instances to indicate ‘operations’ is like the maps used in military headquarters. The places from which money orders had been sent to the addressee in the Far North were indicated by flags, and each place was a railroad station to the north of Mariupol. There were no two flags in the same place. The Office of Investigations was now obliged to turn its efforts to compiling a list of persons who had moved to Mariupol on a permanent basis in the last two years, compare photographs…

That was how Krivoshei was arrested. His wife had been a bold and loyal aide. It was she who had brought him the identification papers and money – more than 50,000 rubles.

As soon as Krivoshei was arrested, she was immediately permitted to leave. Morally and physically exhausted, she left Kolyma on the first boat.

Krivoshei himself served a second sentence as head of the chemical laboratory in the Central Prison Hospital, where he enjoyed certain small privileges from the administration and continued to despise and fear the politicals. As before, he was extremely cautious in his conversations and even took fright if someone made political comments in his presence. His extreme cautiousness and cowardice had a different cause from that of the usual philistine-coward. Things political were of no interest to him, for he knew that a high price was exacted in the camp for the ‘crime’ of making political statements. He simply had no desire to sacrifice his material and physical comfort. It had nothing to do with his intellectual or spiritual view of life.

Krivoshei lived in the laboratory instead of the camp barracks. This was permitted only to privileged prisoners. His clean, regulation cot nestled behind cupboards containing acids and alkalis. It was rumored that he engaged in some unusual form of debauchery in his cave and that even the Irkutsk prostitute, Sonya, was astounded by his knowledge and abilities in this respect. This may not have been the case at all, and such rumors may have been a total fabrication. There were more than enough female civilian employees who wanted to be ‘romanced’ by Krivoshei, a handsome man. He, however, always declined such advances carefully and insistently. They were too risky and carried too high a punishment, and he liked his comfort.

Krivoshei accumulated credits for workdays, no matter how few they might have been, and in a few years was released from camp, but without the right to leave Kolyma. This last circumstance did not trouble him in the slightest. On the day following his release he appeared in an expensive suit, an imported raincoat, and a well-made velour hat.

He obtained a position at one of the factories as a chemical engineer. He really was a specialist on high pressures. He worked for a week and asked for leave ‘because of family circumstances’.

’???’

‘I’m going for a woman,’ Krivoshei explained with a slight smile. ‘I’m going to find a woman at the bride’s market at the Elgen Collective Farm. I want to get married.’ He returned that very evening with a woman.

Near the Elgen Collective Farm, where only women prisoners worked, there was a filling-station. It was in the woods, at the edge of the settlement. Barrels of gasoline stood among the rose willow and alder shrubs, and it was here that the ‘freed’ women of Elgen gathered every evening. Truckloads of ‘suitors’ – yesterday’s convicts – would come in search of a bride. Courtship was a hurried affair – like everything in Kolyma (except the sentences), and the trucks would return with the newly-weds. If necessary, people could get to know each other in greater detail in the bushes, which were sufficiently large and thick.

In the winter all this would take place in private homes and apartments. Bride-picking naturally took much more time in the winter than in summer.

‘But how about your former wife?’

‘We don’t correspond.’

There was no sense trying to find out if this was true or not. Krivoshei could have given the magnificent camp reply: ‘If you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale.’

There was a time in the twenties, during the nebulous youth of the camps and those few ‘zones’ which were called concentration camps, when escape attempts were not considered a crime nor punished by an additional sentence. It seemed natural that the prisoner should attempt to escape, and it was the duty of the guards to catch him. Such relations between two groups of people both separated and linked by the prison bars seemed totally normal. Those were romantic days, when, in the expression of Musset, ‘the past no longer existed, but the future had not yet arrived’. It was only yesterday that the Cossack leader and future White general, Krasnov, was captured and released on his own recognisance. Mainly, it was a time when the limits of Russian patience had not yet been tested, had not yet been stretched to infinity – as was to happen later in the second half of the thirties.

The criminal code of 1926 had not yet been written with its notorious Article 16 (permitting criminal prosecution of acts not classified as crimes, but viewed as being ‘analogous’ to a crime), and Article 35 envisaged the use of internal exile as a form of punishment and created an entire social category of ‘thirty-fivers’.

When the first camps were set up, their legal footing was rather shaky. They required a lot of improvisation and, therefore, there was much arbitrariness on a local level. The notorious Solovetsk ‘smoke-house’, where convicts were forced to stand on stumps in the taiga to be eaten by the incredible Siberian mosquitoes, was an empirical experiment. The empirical principle was a bloody one, since the experiments were conducted on living material, human beings. The authorities could approve such methods as the ‘smoke-house’, and then the practice would be written into camp law, instructions, orders, directives. Or the experiment might be disallowed, and in such instances those responsible for the ‘smoke-house’ were tried by a military tribunal. But then, there were no long sentences at that time. The entire Fourth Division of the Solovki Prison had only two prisoners with ten-year sentences, and everyone pointed them out as if they were movie stars. One was the former colonel of the czarist gendarmerie, Rudenko, and the other was Marianov, an officer of the White Army in the Far East. A five-year sentence was considered lengthy, and most were for two or three years.

In those years – up to the beginning of the thirties – there was no additional sentence for an escape. If you got away, you were in luck; if they caught you
alive
, you were also in luck. It was not often that escaped convicts were returned alive; the convicts’ hatred for the guards developed the latters’ taste for human blood. The prisoner feared for his life – especially during transfers, when a careless word said to the guards could purchase a ticket to the next world, ‘to the moon’. Stricter rules were in effect during transfers of prisoners, and the guards could get away with a lot. During such transfers prisoners often demanded that their hands be tied behind their backs as a form of life insurance. The hope was that if this was done the guards would be reluctant to ‘write off’ a prisoner and then fill in his death certificate with the sacramental phrase: ‘killed during attempt to escape’.

Investigations of such instances were always conducted in a slipshod fashion, and if the murderer was smart enough to fire a second shot in the air, the investigation always produced a conclusion favorable to him. The instruction prescribed a warning shot.

At Vishera, which was the Fourth Division of SLON and the Urals branch of the Solovetsk camps, the commandant, Nesterov, would personally receive recaptured prisoners. He was a heavy-set man with dense black hair that grew on the backs of his long, white hands and even seemed to cover his palms.

The dirty, hungry, beaten, exhausted escapees were coated from head to foot with a thick layer of road dust. They would be brought to Nesterov and thrown at his feet.

‘All right, come closer.’

The prisoner would approach him.

‘Decided to take a stroll? That’s fine, just fine!’

‘Forgive me, Ivan Spiridonych.’

‘I’ll forgive you,’ Nesterov would say in a solemn sing-song voice as he got up from his seat on the porch. ‘I’ll forgive you, but the state won’t forgive…’

His blue eyes would become milky and lined with red veins. His voice, however, remained kind and well disposed.

‘Take your pick – a smack or isolation.’

‘A smack, Ivan Spiridonych.’

Nesterov’s hairy fist would soar at the head of the happy convict, who would wipe away the blood and spit out his broken teeth.

‘Get off to the barracks!’

Nesterov could knock anyone off his feet with one punch, and he prided himself on this famous talent. The returned prisoner too would consider the arrangement to his advantage, since his punishment went no further than Nesterov’s punch.

If the prisoner refused to resolve the matter family-style and insisted on the official punishment, he was locked up in an isolation cell with an iron floor, where two or three months of reduced rations was considerably worse than Nesterov’s ‘smack’.

If the escaped prisoner survived, there were no other unpleasant consequences – aside from the fact that he could no longer count on being lucky when prisoners were being selected for release to ‘unload’ camp.

As the camps grew, the number of escapes also increased, and simply hiring more guards was not effective. It was too expensive, and at that time very few people were interested in the job of camp guard. The question of responsibility for an escape attempt was being resolved in an inadequate, childish fashion.

Soon a new resolution was announced from Moscow: the days a convict spent on the run and the period he passed in a punishment cell after capture were not to be counted into his basic sentence.

This order caused considerable discontent in Bookkeeping. They had to increase personnel, for such complex arithmetical calculations were too much for our camp accountants.

The order was implemented and read aloud to the entire camp during head counts.

Alas, it did not frighten the would-be escapees at all.

Every day the ‘escaped’ column grew in the reports of the company commanders, and the camp director frowned more and more as he read these daily reports.

Kapitonov, a musician in the camp band, was one of the camp director’s favorites. He walked out of the camp, using his gleaming cornet as if it were a pass, and left the instrument hanging on the branch of a fir. At that point the camp head lost his composure altogether.

In late fall three convicts were killed during an escape. After the bodies were identified, the head of the camp ordered that they be exhibited for three days beside the camp gates – so that everyone had to pass them when leaving for work. But even this unofficial sharp reminder neither stopped nor even lessened the number of escapes.