Travels in Siberia (66 page)

The floor of the barracks was worn planking, tightly joined and still sound. I saw nothing on it but a few twists of straw and the wooden sole of a shoe. A short, cylindrical iron stove rusted near a corner. Its stovepipe was gone and the hole for it in the plank roof above had been covered over. Prisoners who had lived in barracks like this reported that the stove usually heated a radius of fifteen to eighteen feet. As this building was maybe thirty feet from end to end, areas of it must have always been cold. From inside you could see the logs that the walls were made of. The cracks between the logs had been chinked with moss. The barracks space had been divided into several rooms, with bunks set into the walls. The bunks also were made of bare planks—some planed on both sides, some planed on only one. Planks with the bark still on them had been fitted into the bunks so that the bark side faced down.

This interior offered little to think about besides the limitless periods of suffering that had been crossed off here, and the unquiet rest these
bunks had held. Often prisoners in places like this had to sleep on the unimproved planking, or on thin mattresses stuffed with sawdust. For covering they might have had a single blanket, or nothing besides the clothes they wore during the day. Mornings began as early as 4:00 a.m., when the guards would awaken them by pounding with a hammer on a saw blade. That wake-up alarm, and the screeching of the guard dogs’chains on the wires stretched between the guard towers as the dogs ran back and forth, were characteristic sounds of the camps. Before the prisoners went out to work they were given breakfast—usually soup with a small piece of fish or meat, and bread. Even in 1977, not a lean time, the diet in Soviet strict-regime camps provided only two thousand six hundred calories per prisoner per day, less in the punishment blocks and sick wards. The international standard for a person actively working is three thousand two hundred to four thousand two hundred calories per day. Like almost all labor-camp prisoners, the ones in this barracks would have been hungry almost all the time.

Hunger in the camps made people eat many things. In the camps of the Kolyma during the warmer months, some of the prisoners ate grass. Intellectuals, for unknown reasons, were more subject to that malady. People who ate grass generally did not live long. Varlam Shalamov, the writer who survived seventeen years in Kolyma, wrote about prisoners there during the war who ate half a Lend-Lease barrel of machine grease before the guards drove them off with rifle shots. The prisoners had thought the machine grease might be butter; they said it tasted about as much like butter as American bread tasted like bread. They showed no ill effects afterward. In
The Gulag Archipelago
, Solzhenitsyn told of a work detail in Kolyma who were doing excavations when they came across a frozen-solid, perfectly preserved ancient stream complete with prehistoric fish and salamanders. He said that a magazine of the Soviet Academy of Sciences reported that unfortunately these interesting specimens could not be studied, because the workers who unearthed them ate them on the spot. He said the magazine did not identify these workers as convict laborers, though from that detail an astute reader would understand they were.

After breakfast in the
lager
came inspection, and then the prisoners would be lined up in the camp yard to receive orders for the day. If they were to be sent on a timber-cutting detail, the best assignment was that
of taking the smaller limbs trimmed from the downed trees and feeding them to the fire. If their day’s job was to work on the road, breaking a path through the snow with their bodies for horses and vehicles to follow, the assignment you wanted least was to be the man who walked on point, ahead of the others. Usually prisoners received no food during their twelve-hour workday. Guards watched them the whole time, and they had to keep within a boundary indicated by pieces of red cloth or other markers distributed around the work site. Any prisoner who crossed the boundary area would be shot, and the guard who shot him would get a day or two off. Sometimes guards tried to fool prisoners into going over the line just so they could shoot them. If the prisoners were doing road building, they toiled with picks, sledgehammers, shovels, and wheelbarrows. Even in forty-below weather the work caused them to sweat heavily. Back at camp at the end of the day, they had to stand in formation for another roll call while the sweat froze in their clothes. Then they marched into the barracks for a supper that was similar to breakfast, followed by a brief time for personal activities like letter writing and reading the little mail they were allowed. Then sleep.

As a bizarre extra, some camp systems maintained small orchestras. Occasionally in the mornings as the prisoners marched off to work, and in the evenings when they returned, the orchestra would be at the
lager
gate encouraging them with upbeat melodies.

Of course the death toll was cruelly high. More than a million died in the camps just in 1937–38, the Great Purge’s peak years. A main goal of the Soviet labor-camp system was to take those citizens the Soviet Union did not need, for political or social or unfathomable reasons, and convert their lives to gold and timber that could be traded abroad. Almost from the beginnings of the camps, people outside the country knew or suspected what was going on in them, but the Soviet government simply denied all accusations and the subject receded from view. In 1941, after the Soviet Union joined the Allies and had to release its Polish prisoners, some of these survivors with firsthand experience told what they knew, and the ongoing horror of the camps became established beyond reasonable denial.

When the war was over, and the United States made agreements with Stalin whereby Russian P.O.W.s brought from France and Germany at the end of the war would be repatriated, some of those slated for return
committed suicide in places of temporary confinement like Ellis Island and Fort Dix, New Jersey, rather than face the gulag. As Russia retook Poland, many Poles once again wound up in the gulag. Some who had lived through the Nazi occupation said Hitler was nothing compared to this, and they now wished they had fought on Hitler’s side. A prisoner who had survived Dachau hanged himself when he was shipped to Kolyma. Gulag prisoners who knew the novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
regretted that fate had put them in this time and place, and not in slavery in the American South a hundred years before. As Negro slaves, they reasoned, at least they would have lived someplace warm, and would have been whipped and branded but not worked to death outright. In 1945, news reached the camps that the United States now possessed the atomic bomb. According to Solzhenitsyn, this unexpected development gave hope to many prisoners, who began to pray for atomic war.

As I looked at the tiers of bunks I pictured male
zeks
—the word for gulag prisoners—lying on them, but the prisoners here might have been women, too. Female
zeks
worked in timber-cutting camps and on road-building details, and even mining gold. Their resilience was greater than men’s, as was their ability to withstand pain. Or perhaps this barracks had been one of those occupied by and completely under the control of criminals. This distressingly numerous class played the camp system to exempt themselves from labor and, with the encouragement of the authorities, preyed on the political prisoners. The criminals’ ethics and speech seeped into everybody’s life. Political prisoners later said that the criminals in the camps were more dangerous than the meager food and the killing work conditions. The gulag also had
lagers
for children. Eugenia Ginsburg, who served fifteen years in the camps of Kolyma, wrote that when a camp of children prisoners in Magadan was given two guard-dog puppies to raise for a while, the children at first could not think of anything to name them. The poverty of their surroundings had stripped their imaginations bare. Finally they chose names from common objects they saw every day. They named one puppy Ladle and the other Pail.

Unlike the prisons of the tsars, the
lagers
of Soviet Siberia (or Soviet anywhere) were virtually escapeproof. To anyone sizing up the surroundings of this camp on the Olchan River, it would have been obvious that the country was tough traveling even for a well-equipped nonnative; for
a ragged escapee being hunted by guards who feared for their own lives if they failed, the cold and geography constituted a fearful prison in themselves. Stories of the very few who did get away, even temporarily, became legends in the camps.

Shalamov told the story (a fictional one, like all Shalamov’s Kolyma stories, but based on fact) of a prisoner named Krivoshei who escaped from a Kolyma camp by impersonating a geologist. Krivoshei was fortunate in that he had a helpful wife on the outside who kept him supplied with money. One summer day, Krivoshei walked away from his work team, hired some native assistants, and with a geologist’s hammer and a few other props continued slowly out of the region, collecting rock samples as he went. Occasionally he would stop and ship crates of random rocks to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Krivoshei was an educated and self-possessed man, quite believable in his role as a scientist, though he knew nothing about geology. In a month or so he had crossed the mountain chain that separates Kolyma from Yakutia, and in time he made his way to the city of Yakutsk. To keep up his disguise, he paid a visit to the local scientific society (this was in Stalin times, before the geologists I met were there), and the directors of the society were so impressed by him that they begged him to give a lecture about his geological discoveries. Having little choice, Krivoshei agreed, cautioning the directors that he must keep certain details secret on orders from Moscow. Then he winged a lecture as best he could, somewhat mystifying his audience. They asked him to repeat it for the local students, and again he obliged. He managed to leave Yakutsk with his cover intact, and he made his way to a small city in western Russia, where he established himself and disappeared from view for a while. The authorities tracked him down as a result of the correspondence he had maintained with his wife, and Krivoshei was rearrested and shipped back to Kolyma. He had remained at large for two years.

The sun shone brightly in the blue sky, the snow at my knees was a light and fluffy powder, and my breath froze on the fur around the hood of my coat. In dimmer light inside the barracks, Sergei was just standing, not saying anything, getting a sense of what it felt like to be in there. I walked a distance away to see what the barracks looked like from the back. In
that direction the fences were more tumbledown and I moved carefully, not wanting to trip over any of that wicked barbed wire in the snow.

The greatest discovery my father’s research lab made in the 1950s, or ever, was of a revolutionary new process for manufacturing a plastic called acrylonitrile. In its fibrous form, this plastic is good at retaining heat, so a packing of acrylonitrile fibers can be an effective substitute for wool or down in cold-weather clothing. Once the process had been perfected and patented, it worked so well and so cheaply that anyone who wanted to make this plastic had to use it. Countries as well as companies lined up to pay the licensing fee. My father’s former boss, who had been the head of the research lab at the time of the discovery, once told me that the Soviet Union had been among those countries, and that it had paid the $15 million licensing fee in gold. In those years most Soviet gold would have come from Kolyma, whose camps were deadlier than timber-cutting or road-building camps like this.

What I’m trying to say is that although the labor camps of the gulag were indeed far from our 1950s lives, they didn’t exist on another planet entirely. For example, some of the barbed wire, a product vital to the camps, might have been of American manufacture; barbed wire was among the 9.2 million tons of Lend-Lease goods shipped from the West Coast to ports of the Soviet Far East. During the thirties, Dalstroi used some of its gold to purchase machinery and gold-mining equipment from America. American firms sold handcuffs to the NKVD in the Far East. Varlam Shalamov wrote about a time in a camp of the Kolyma when a mass grave of
zeks
who had died some time ago came sliding down a mountainside; the cold had kept the bodies undecayed, so that faces could still be recognized. After the bodies were reburied by a Lend-Lease bulldozer, Shalamov wrote, “On the mirror-like blade there was no scratch, not a single spot.” Robert Conquest describes a large Marion excavator disintegrating in a mine-tailings dump, broken and rusted, after having been ruined by
zek
operators. Marion earthmoving equipment was made by a company in the town of Marion, in north-central Ohio.

Simply in geographic terms, many of the worst gulag prisons were closer to America than they were to Moscow. I have already mentioned the prisoner-built city of Provideniya, a seventy-five-minute plane ride from Nome. In other parts of Chukotka there were said to be prison camps so dreadful that very few prisoners sent to them survived. Anchorage
is closer to Magadan (1,962 miles) than it is to San Francisco (2,005 miles). Magadan is 3,673 miles from Moscow. Even in these camps on the Topolinskaya Highway, the distance to America is about 1,600 miles shorter than the distance to Moscow.

Prisoners who suffered the terrible fate of being sentenced to work in the gold-mining camps of the Upper Kolyma, in the far north where that river empties into the Eastern Siberian Sea of the Arctic Ocean, went by train to Vladivostok, and there or in the neighboring port of Nakhodka boarded slave ships that could carry thousands of prisoners for the long voyage northward along Siberia’s Pacific coast, through the Bering Strait, and westward along the Arctic coast to the Kolyma River delta. These ships sailed with their decks battened down, few lights showing, and the prisoners kept below in conditions that survivors described as something out of Dante. One method of controlling the prisoners in their cold cages was by hosing them down with seawater. As the reach of Stalin’s police began to expand in the early 1930s, more prisoners were sent to the Far East, and the slave ship traffic increased.