The Stalin Epigram (29 page)

More about the professor. He was an Old Bolshevik, having fought, as he proudly informed us, in the battle for the Winter Palace at the time of the Revolution. Being a diehard Marxist, he
gathered prisoners in the cattle car around him at night and delivered lectures on the dictatorship of the proletariat or dielectrical materialism or exploitation by the capitalist class. After the
lectures, the professor opened the floor to questions. The night of his first lecture, I raised a finger and he nodded in my direction. “What are you being sent up for?” I asked.

“Violation of Article 58,” he replied, looking me straight in the eye. “I was accused of belonging to an anti-Soviet Trotkyist wrecking group that was planning to assassinate
Stalin and other members of the Politburo.”

Many in the cattle car, me included, greeted this with a buzz of anger. It had not occurred to us that this small man with bushy hair over his ears and bald crown could be a dangerous criminal.
“Were you guilty?” a woman called from the back of the car.

“Of course he was guilty,” I said, “otherwise he wouldn’t be on his way to Siberia.”

“I was guilty,” the professor said, “but not of what they accused me of. I signed a petition circulated by Communist students at my university supporting Bukharin’s
criticism of forced collectivization of agriculture. Like Bukharin, we were not against collectivization itself—the idea of peasants being treated as agricultural workers and drawing salaries
the same as factory workers seemed to us to be a logical extension of Marxist doctrine. But we favored a more gradual approach—we would have
lured
the peasants onto collectives with
good housing and a fifty-four-hour workweek and a guaranteed wage even if the harvest was poor. The other peasants, seeing how much better life turned out to be on the collective, would have
drifted in that direction of their own free will instead of destroying their livestock and their crops in protest.”

The old man who was paralyzed spoke up. “How is it that despite being falsely convicted, you still call yourself a Marxist?”

“With pride, with hope in the future of Russia and all mankind, I call myself a Marxist and a Leninist,” the professor declared. “Progress is not a straight line. It zigs and
it zags as it attempts to avoid the Western materialistic mind-set that is indifferent to suffering and find a distinctive Russian path to modernity. Each zig, each zag results in unnecessary
distress, even the death of true believers. Let me put it another way. Until the Bolsheviks came on the scene, man was the
object
of history—he was kicked around like a football by
tyrannical leaders of religious institutions and capitalist empires. With the coming of Communism, man discredited the religious institutions and the capitalist tyrants and became the
subject
of history. In this cattle car, on this train steaming toward the most remote corner of Siberia, I see myself as a soldier on the front line of the world proletarian revolution.
What’s the difference if I lay the foundations for Communism in European Russia or on some Siberian taiga? Comrades, I shall supply the answer to my own question. There is no
difference.”

Several of the women prisoners started applauding softly. Then the men joined in and the applause grew louder. And me, too, I began clapping my hands together, setting a rhythm to the applause
that matched the moan of the wheels on the rails. And soon everybody was applauding and stomping on the floorboards to the rhythm I set, and I knew that I would look back on the trip in the cattle
car as one of the high points of my life, right up there with my silver medal in Vienna, Austria and my handshake with Comrade Stalin.

Washing my feet and my one pair of spare socks in an icy stream the next afternoon, I overheard a lady mention what the professor was a professor of. It turned out to be something called
linguistics. The lady said he was famous for figuring out the difference between languages and dialects—languages were spoken by people with armies, dialects by people without. The professor
was no slouch in geography, neither, because no sooner had our train started out than he marked the route from Moscow to Magadanskaya in chalk on the wood siding of the cattle car, ticking off the
cities as he caught glimpses of them through the crack between the boards—Nizhni-Novgorod, Kazan, Yekaterinburg (where, good riddance to bad rubbish, the Bolsheviks executed the last tsar),
Omsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutskaya.

That first night out he had all the food and water and water receptacles in the cattle car collected and appointed a committee to distribute rations, to each according to his need, which is to
say the children and the old people got to get more water than the able-bodied prisoners like myself. He appointed another committee, made up of peasant women, whose job it was to search for cedar
nuts and edible roots whenever the train pulled up on a siding and we were allowed off to fill the receptacles from a rivulet or brook. From time to time, usually after we passed through a city
late at night, the guards slid back the heavy door and threw in a paper sack filled with loaves of bread. In the other cars you could hear the prisoners cursing and battling among themselves as
they fought over the bread. In our car the ration committee took charge of the sack and doled out the bread so that it pretty much lasted until the next city and the next sack.

Some of the prisoners wrote letters on their own, but for the illiterate there was the professor’s letter writing committee, made up of three ex-schoolteachers. To begin with they made the
rounds of the cattle car, collecting blank pages from the books the prisoners had brought with them. Writing on the pages in the style of the prison camps, which is to say in a tiny handwriting
that filled every square centimeter of the paper, they copied off letters for the prisoners who couldn’t write their own. The name and address of the receiver of the letter was printed out on
one side, then the paper was folded and refolded so that only the receiver’s name and address was visible, at which point it was
mailed
through the toilet hole when we passed a town or
village at night. The professor told us there was a tradition that went back to the tsar’s penal colonies whereby peasants coming across letters on the railroad tracks would copy the address
onto an envelope and, as stamps were dirt cheap, post it. That way relatives and friends back in Moscow would get news of the prisoners being transported to Siberia. I myself didn’t take
advantage of this letter-writing system because I didn’t want people to think I couldn’t read or write.

There was another committee, which the professor called the propaganda team. I am not sure I really understood what they were up to, but I’ll describe it in case the reader of this account
understands it better than me. The committee, made up entirely of city women that were members of the Party, asked all the ladies to contribute scraps of nylon or lace undergarments. (One lady
still dressed in the ball gown she was wearing the night of her arrest donated an entire pettiskirt.) And when our train passed through big cities or even middle-sized towns, which was always at
night, the committee members stuffed the scraps through the joints between the planking in the side of the car so that they were flying in the current of air caused by the motion of the train. And
when we were past the city or town, the scraps of undergarment were pulled back and hidden until we came to the next population center.

The professor’s children committee kept the kids distracted with games of buttons and fairy tales. But the adults, notwithstanding what I call the first-class conditions in our cattle car,
were all down in the mouth. All except your servitor, Fikrit Shotman. I can honestly say I looked forward to paying my debt to society, wiping clean my slate of deceit and treachery the comrade
interrogator had skillfully exposed to the world. The way I saw it, the sooner I reached the transit camp, the sooner I would be packed off to a gulag (a word I picked up from fellow prisoners) to
purge my crimes against the Soviet state. Four years was not forever. I was alive and in good health and physically fit and would return to Agrippina and the circus and pick up my life wiser in the
ways of the world, but not all that much older. It was important to see the trip east in a positive light. All of my heroes, starting with Vladimir Lenin and including Comrade Stalin, had spent
years in exile and returned stronger because of the experience. Don’t get me wrong. I am not comparing myself with Lenin or Stalin. I’m just saying that, having conducted myself with
dignity at my trial, I was determined to conduct myself with dignity in my present situation. In a word, I was determined to put the past where it belonged, which was behind me.

Our excitement grew as we approached Magadanskaya on the professor’s chalk map. The streams we washed in felt colder even though yellow dandelions were pushing up their heads and summer
was near enough to smell. The landscape turned rougher, the underbrush near the tracks became tangled with wild berries, the wild goats that came down to drink from a stream we were washing in had
long curling claws that hadn’t been cut in years, not as many villages were visible from the train and there was more distance between them, you could go for half a day without seeing a
plowed field or a break in the forest. The emptiness reminded me of the Kara Kum Desert near Khiva in Turkmenistan, except here there was no sand, only permafrost and mountains with snow still on
top of them in June. Pulling through the Magadanskaya marshaling yards, I kept my eye glued to one of the spaces between the planks. I saw wooden houses with small vegetable gardens. I saw cows or
goats tethered to brightly painted fences. I saw a lumber cooperative with a hammer over the door and a tractor repair station with a sickle over the hangar. I saw delivery wagons drawn by oxen. In
short, I saw what looked like civilization thriving in this Soviet Socialist Republic.

When the train came to a stop at a siding, we were kept waiting in the stifling cattle car for hours. Tempers flared. Two men almost came to blows. Happily the professor found the words to sooth
everyone’s nerves. We could hear officials dealing with the prisoners in the cars ahead of us. Finally the door to our car was slid open by armed guards wearing gray belted uniform blouses
and peaked Budyonny caps. Some of them were holding snarling dogs on short leashes. Two men, one in army fatigues, the other in a rumpled civilian suit, sat at a table on the wooden quay facing our
door. The one in civilian clothing called out the professor’s name. “Kaganovich, Alter.” The professor bid us farewell with a jaunty wave of his hand. Some of the woman turned
their heads away to hide their tears. I turned my head away so nobody would see I wasn’t crying. (Where I come from, which is the mountains of Azerbaidzhan, men do not cry.) The civilian at
the table read from a paper in a voice loud enough for all of us to hear. “Violation of Article 58 of the Penal Code, sentenced to twenty years without the right of correspondence.”
From the cattle car, we could see the professor hand over his identity card to the man in civilian clothing, then pin what looked like a number on the front of his shirt and join the other convicts
already crouching in the back of an open truck parked nearby.

I took heart from the fact he was on his way to construct Communism in Siberia.

One by one the comrade prisoners jumped to the quay when their names were called and presented themselves to the men sitting behind the table. (The two who almost came to blows carried the
paralyzed man when his turn came. The army officer seemed puzzled to find himself dealing with someone who was tagged with a tenner for wrecking but couldn’t walk. The civilian tossed his
head toward something I couldn’t see. The army officer agreed and the paralyzed man was carted off in a wheelbarrow in that direction, never to be seen again, at least by me.) And then I
heard my name.
Shotman, Fikrit
. “Present and eager to begin serving my sentence,” I shouted back, which drew a nervous giggle from the prisoners still in my cattle car. I leaped
to the ground and stood to attention before the table.

“
Zek
Sh744239, where are your belongings?”

“Except for a spare pair of socks, I got none, Your Honors.”

“What skills do you have?”

“I used to be able to dead lift two hundred and eighty-five kilograms—even with my bad knee I can probably still do two hundred kilograms.”

“What does that mean,
dead lift
?”

“There are three kinds of weight lifts, Your Honors—there’s the squat lift, there’s the bench press and there’s the dead lift,” I began.

The army officer cut me short impatiently. “Forget I asked.” He said something to the civilian next to him, who nodded in agreement. “What do you know about gold,
Shotman?” the army officer asked.

“The best I could do was silver, Your Honors.”

The two men behind the table exchanged looks. “You mined
silver
?” the civilian demanded.

“I
won
silver, Your Honors. In Vienna, Austria. In 1932. That’s what I was trying to tell you. I won silver for the dead lift, coming in ten kilograms behind the American Bob
Hoffman, who took gold. Stalin himself shook my hand in the Kremlin when I brought the silver medal back to Moscow.”

“I’ll repeat my question,” the army officer said. “What do you know about gold
mining
?”

I scratched my head. “What I know about gold mining you could fit into a sewing thimble,” I said, thinking I would get credit for honesty.

The civilian scribbled something at the bottom of a sheet of paper and handed me a number to pin on my shirt front. “You’ll learn what you need to know about gold mining at the Kolma
settlement,” he said. Motioning me to join the men sitting on a rise behind the quay, he called the next name.

“So you’re off to the Kolma River,” the soldier guarding the group said as I settled down on the ground with the others.

“Where is the Kolma River?” I asked.

“It’s nine days north of here,” one of the prisoners, a city man judging from his lace-up shoes, said. He didn’t sound enthusiastic.