Gulag (27 page)

The code was not in widespread use at all times. By 1949, Zayara Vesyolaya “could find no one who knew the ‘prison alphabet’” in Butyrka, and thought at first that the tradition must have died out. She later decided she was wrong, both because others told her they had used it at that time, and because a guard once burst into her cell when he heard a knocking sound, demanding to know the origins.
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There were other variations. The Russian writer and poet, Anatoly Zhigulin, claims to have invented a code, also based on the alphabet, which he and a group of his friends (they were all arrested at once) used to communicate during the investigation of their case.
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In certain places and at certain times, prisoners’ methods of self-organization took more elaborate forms. One in particular is described by Varlam Shalamov in his short story “Committees for the Poor,” and also mentioned by others.
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Its origins lay in an unfair rule: at one point, during the late 1930s, the authorities suddenly decided that prisoners undergoing interrogation were to receive no packages from their relatives whatsoever, on the grounds that even “two French rolls, five apples and a pair of old pants were enough to transmit any text into the prison.” Only money could be sent, and that only in round numbers, so that the sums could not be used to spell out “messages.” Yet not all prisoners’ families had money to send. Some were too poor, some too far away, while others may even have played a part in denouncing their relatives in the first place. That meant that although some prisoners had access once a week to the prison commissary— to butter, cheese, sausage, tobacco, white bread, cigarettes—others had to subsist on the poor prison diet, and, more important, would have felt “out of place at the general holiday” that was “commissary day.”

To solve this problem, the prisoners of Butyrka resurrected a phrase from the early days of the Revolution, and organized “Committees of the Poor.” Each prisoner donated 10 percent of his money to the committee. In turn, the committee purchased food items for prisoners who had none. This system went on for some years, until the authorities decided to eliminate the committees by promising some prisoners “rewards” of various kinds for refusing to participate. The cells fought back, however, and ostracized the refusers. And who, asks Shalamov, “would risk placing himself in opposition to the entire group, to people who are with you twenty-four hours a day, where only sleep can save you from the hostile glare of your fellow inmates?”

Curiously, this short story is one of the few in Shalamov’s extensive repertoire to end on a positive note: “Unlike the ‘free’ world ‘outside,’ or the camps, society in prison is always united. In the committees this society found a way to make a positive statement as to the right of every man to live his own life.”
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This most pessimistic of writers had found, in this one organized form of prisoner solidarity, a shred of hope. The trauma of the transports, and the horror of the first bewildering days in the camps, soon shattered it.

Chapter 9

TRANSPORT, ARRIVAL, SELECTION

I remember Vanino port
And the clamor of the gloomy ship
As we walked along the gangway
Into the cold, murky hold.
The
zeks
suffered from the rolling of the surf
The deep sea howled all around them—
And in front of them lay Magadan
The capital of the land of Kolyma.
Not cries, but pitiful moans
Emerged from every breast
As they said goodbye to the mainland.
The ship rolled, strained, groaned . . .

—Soviet prisoners’ song

IN 1827, Princess Maria Volkonskaya, the wife of the Decembrist rebel Sergei Volkonsky, left her family, her child, and her safe life in St. Petersburg to join her husband in his Siberian exile. Her biographer described her journey, which was thought, at the time, to have been one of almost unendurable hardship:

Day after day, the sledge raced onwards into the endless horizon. Enclosed as if in a time capsule, Maria was in a state of feverish elation. There was a sense of unreality to the journey: lack of sleep and little food. She stopped only at an occasional relay for a glass of hot lemon tea from the ever-present brass samovar. The intoxicating speed of the sleigh, pulled by three plunging horses, devoured the empty distances at a gallop. “Onward . . . forward!” shouted the drivers, dashing on as great plumes of snow rose from under the horses’ hooves, and harness bells jingled relentlessly, warning of the approach of the vehicle . . .
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More than a century later Evgeniya Ginzburg’s cell mate read a similar description of an aristocrat’s journey across the Urals—and sighed with envy: “And I always thought that the wives of the Decembrists endured the most frightful sufferings . . .”
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No horses and no sleighs drove twentieth-century prisoners with “intoxicating speed” across the Siberian snow, and there were no glasses of hot lemon tea to be had from brass samovars at the relay stations. Princess Volkonskaya may have wept during her journey, but the prisoners who came after her could not even hear the word
étap—
prison jargon for “transport”—without feeling a jolt of mouth-drying fear, even terror. Every journey was a wrenching leap into the unknown, a move away from familiar cell mates and familiar arrangements, however poor those might be. Worse, the process of moving prisoners from prison to transit prison, from transit prison to camp, and between camps within the system, was physically grueling and openly cruel. In some senses, it was the most inexplicable aspect of life in the Gulag.

For those undergoing the ordeal for the first time, the event was pregnant with symbolism. Arrest and interrogation had been an initiation into the system, but the train journey across Russia represented a geographical break with the prisoners’ former life, and the start of a new one. Emotions always ran high in the trains that left Moscow and Leningrad, headed north and east. Thomas Sgovio, the American who had failed to retrieve his passport, remembered what had happened when his train left for Kolyma: “Our train left Moscow on the evening of June 24th. It was the beginning of an eastward journey which was to last a month. I can never forget the moment. Seventy men . . . began to cry.”
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Most of the time, long transports took place in stages. If they were being held in large city prisons, the
zeks
were first transported to the trains in trucks whose very design spoke of the NKVD’s obsession with secrecy. From the outside, the “Black Ravens,” as they were nicknamed, appeared to be regular heavy-goods trucks. In the 1930s, they often had the word “bread” painted on the sides, but later more elaborate ruses were used. One prisoner, arrested in 1948, remembered traveling in one truck marked “Moscow Cutlets” and another labeled “Vegetables/Fruits.”
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On the inside, the trucks were sometimes divided into “two rows of tiny, pitch-black, airless cages,” as one prisoner described them.
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According to a design of 1951, others simply had two long benches, upon which prisoners squeezed beside one another.
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Peasants, and those being transported at the start of the mass deportations from the Baltic States and eastern Poland, had a rougher time of it. They were often packed into ordinary-goods trucks, as an elderly Lithuanian once described to me, “like sardines”: the first prisoner spread his legs, the second sat between the first’s legs and spread his own legs—and so on, until the truck was full.
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Such arrangements were particularly uncomfortable when there were many people to be collected, and a trip to the station could last all day. During the deportations that took place in the former Polish territories in the winter of February 1940, children froze to death before even reaching the trains, and adults suffered from severe frostbite, from which their arms and legs never recovered.
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In provincial cities, the secrecy rules were laxer and prisoners sometimes marched through towns to the train station, an experience which often provided their last glimpse of civilian life—and one of the civilians’ few glimpses of prisoners. Janusz Bardach recalled his surprise at the reaction of townspeople in Petropavlovsk when they saw prisoners marching through the street:

Most in the entourage were women wrapped in shawls and long heavy coats made out of felt. To my amazement, they began shouting at the guards: “Fascists . . . Murderers . . . Why don’t you go and fight on the front . . .” They began throwing snowballs at the guards. Several shots were fired into the air, and the women backed off several paces but continued cursing and following us. They tossed parcels, bread loaves and potatoes and bacon wrapped in cloth into the column. One woman removed her shawl and winter coat and gave them to a man who had none. I caught a pair of woolen mittens.
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Such reactions have a long tradition in Russia: Dostoevsky wrote of the housewives who sent “fancy loaves made of the finest flour” to the inmates of Czarist prisons at Christmastime.
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But by the 1940s, they were relatively rare. In many places—Magadan, famously, among them—the sight of prisoners in the street was so commonplace as to evoke no reaction at all.

Whether on foot or by truck, prisoners eventually reached the train stations. Sometimes these were ordinary stations, sometimes they were special stations—“a piece of land surrounded by barbed wire,” in the memory of Leonid Finkelstein. He also remembered that prisoners were subjected to a series of special rituals before they were allowed to board:

There is a huge column of prisoners, you are counted, re-counted, recounted. The train is there . . . then there is the travel order: “On your knees!” During loading, it was a sensitive time, someone could start running. So they make sure that everybody is kneeling. But you better not get up, because at that point they are trigger-happy. Then they count, they put people onto the car, and lock them up. Then the train never moves—you just stand there for hours on end—then suddenly “We’re off!” and you start going.
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From the outside, the train cars often looked perfectly ordinary—except that they were better protected than most. Edward Buca, who had been arrested in Poland, surveyed his carriage with the careful eye of a man who hoped to escape. He recalled that “each wagon was wound with several strands of barbed wire, there were wooden platforms outside for the guards, electric lights had been installed at the top and bottom of each wagon, and their small windows were protected by thick iron bars.” Later, Buca checked beneath the wagon to see if there were iron spikes along the bottom too. There were.
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Finkelstein also remembered that “every morning you hear this hammering—the guards have wooden hammers, and they always hammer up the trains, to make sure that nobody tried to break out, to make a hole.”
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Very rarely, exceptional arrangements were made for special prisoners. Anna Larina, the wife of the Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin, did not travel with other prisoners, but was instead placed in the guards’ compartment of the train.
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But the vast majority of prisoners and exiles traveled together, in one of two types of train. The first were the
Stolypinki
, or “Stolypin wagons” (named, ironically, after one of the more vigorous, reforming Czarist prime ministers of the early twentieth century, who is alleged to have introduced them). These were ordinary carriages that had been refitted for prisoners. They could be linked together in an enormous transport, or attached, one or two at a time, to ordinary trains. One former passenger described them:

A
Stolypinka
resembles an ordinary Russian third-class carriage except that it has a great many iron bars and grillwork. The windows are, of course, barred. The individual compartments are separated by steel netting instead of walls, like cages, and a long iron fence separates the compartments from the corridor. This arrangement enables the guards constantly to keep an eye on all prisoners in the car.
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The Stolypin wagons were also very, very crowded:

On each of the two top bunks two men lay head by foot. On the two middle ones were seven with their heads towards the door and one crosswise at their feet. Under each of the two bottom bunks there was one man, with fourteen more perched upon the bunks and on the bundles of belongings jammed in the floor space between the bunks and door. At night all those at the lower level somehow managed to lie down alongside one another.
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But there was another, more important disadvantage. Inside the Stolypin wagons, guards could watch the prisoners at all times, and were therefore able to control what prisoners ate, to hear their conversations— and to decide when and where they would be able to relieve themselves. As a result, virtually every memoirist who describes the trains mentions the horrors associated with urination and defecation. Once, or sometimes twice a day, or sometimes not at all, the guards took prisoners to the toilet, or else stopped the train to let the passengers out: “The worst happens when, after a long haggle with the guards, we are allowed off the cars and everybody looks for a spot somewhere under the boxcar to relieve himself or herself, not worrying about the audience watching from all directions.”
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However embarrassing such stops could be, the prisoners with stomach ailments or other medical problems were in a much worse position, as one remembered: “Prisoners who could not hold themselves would whimperingly foul their pants and often also the prisoners next to them. Even in the community of hardship, it was difficult for some prisoners not to hate the unfortunates who did this.”
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It was for that reason that some prisoners actually preferred the other form of prisoner transport, the cattle wagons. These were what they sound like: empty wagons, not necessarily fitted out for human beings, sometimes with a small stove in the center for heating, sometimes with bunks. Although more primitive than the Stolypin wagons, the cattle wagons were not divided into sections, and there was more room to move about. They also had “toilets”—holes in the floor of the wagon—alleviating the need to beg and plead with the guards.
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The open wagons had their special torments too, though. Sometimes, for example, the holes in the floor of the wagon became blocked. On Buca’s train, the hole froze over. “So what did we do? We pissed through a crack between the floor and the door and shat into a piece of cloth, making a small neat parcel and hoping that somewhere they would stop the train and open the door so that we could throw it out.”
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On the trains full of deported exiles, in which men, women, and children were all thrown together, the holes in the floor caused different problems. One former deportee, exiled as the daughter of a kulak in the early 1930s, remembered people being “horribly embarrassed” at having to urinate in front of one another, and was thankful that she was able to do it “behind my mother’s skirts.”
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Yet the real torment was not the crowding or the toilets or the embarrassment, but the lack of food—and especially the lack of water. Sometimes, depending on the route and the type of train, prisoners were served hot food during the trip. Sometimes they were not. Usually, a prisoner’s “dry rations” for a transport consisted of bread, which could be distributed either in small chunks of 300 grams a day, or else in larger quantities—2 kilograms or so— meant to last a thirty-four-day journey.

Along with the bread, prisoners were usually given salted fish—the effect of which was to make them extremely thirsty.
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Nevertheless, they were rarely given more than one mug of water per day, even in the summer. So prevalent was this practice that stories of the terrible thirst experienced by traveling prisoners appear again and again. “Once, for three days we didn’t get water, and on New Year’s Eve of 1939, somewhere near Lake Baikal, we had to lick the black icicles which hung from the train carriages,” wrote one ex-zek.
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In a twenty-eight-day trip, another remembers being given water three times, with the train occasionally stopping “to take the corpses off.”
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