Travels in Siberia (67 page)

In the fall of 1933, a ship loaded with thousands of prisoners bound for the Upper Kolyma left Nakhodka Harbor. The ship’s name was the
Dzhurma
. At about the same time, a scientific research ship named the
Chelyuskin
sailed eastward from Murmansk to do studies along the Arctic coast. Winter came on suddenly that year, and in early December the
Chelyuskin
became stuck in the ice off Chukotka. Soviet newspapers reported extensively on this crisis, and people all over Russia and around the world followed the
Chelyuskin
’s predicament.

Eventually the scientists and crew were rescued by Soviet pilots in a daring operation, widely trumpeted in the Soviet news. Other nations had offered to help the
Chelyuskin
, but the Russians refused all assistance. Years later, observers of the USSR guessed why. As it turned out, the slave ship
Dzhurma
had also become frozen in the ice and was just two hundred miles from the
Chelyuskin
. Doubtless the Soviets had not wanted the world to know that the slave ship existed at all. What happened on that icebound ship, with food gone and hope of rescue lost, is still only hinted at today. It is said that the dead were eaten by the living. When the ship finally reached port the following spring, some of the surviving guards and crew had gone insane, and none of the prisoners were still on board.

The Kolyma slave-ship voyages, among the grisliest of the many grisly events of Soviet times, also came the closest to American shores. Sailing through the Bering Strait, the ships would have passed within about twenty-five miles of the U.S. border. Under just the right conditions, a person standing on U.S. soil would have been able to see the ships as they passed by.

While Sergei and I were exploring the camp, the driver and the other passengers waited for us in the vehicle. We could not delay them much longer. Sergei had already started up the slope, walking backward and videotaping as he went. I took another turn around the inside of the perimeter and then exited at the gate. I now saw that what had once been the
lager
’s driveway curved to the left through a denser stand of trees, and I followed it, knowing it would soon intersect the road. Before the trees obscured the view, I stopped to look at the camp one last time.

What struck me then and still strikes me now was the place’s overwhelming aura of absence. The deserted prison camp just sat there—unexcused, un-torn-down, unexplained. During its years of operation it had been a secret, and in some sense it still was. Horrors had happened here, and/or miseries and sufferings and humiliations short of true horrors. “No comment,” the site seemed to say.

I thought this camp, and all the others along this road, needed large historical markers in front of them, with names and dates and details; and there should be ongoing archaeology here, and areas roped off, and painstaking excavation, and well-informed docents in heated kiosks giving talks for visitors. Teams of researchers should be out looking for camp survivors, if any, and for former guards, and for whoever had baked the bread in the bakery. Extensive delving into KGB or Dalstroi files should be showing who exactly was imprisoned here when, and what they were in for, and what became of them. The
zek
engineers and builders who made the hand-constructed bridges should be recognized and their photographs placed on monuments beside the road, and the whole Topolinskaya Highway for all its 189 kilometers should be declared a historic district, and the graves, of which there may be many, should be found and marked and given requiem.

Beneath a surface layer of unbelief or Orthodox Christianity, Russia is an animist country. Ordinary physical objects are alive in Russia far more than they are in America, and however Russia’s religious or political currents flow, this native animism remains strong. Trees, streets, utensils, groves, machines—each has its own spirit and its own personality, like the cabin belonging to the witch Baba Yaga that could get up on its chicken legs and run around. A Russian telephone isn’t just a phone, it’s a being. Once at Alex Melamid’s mother’s apartment when I was having trouble dialing her phone, she showed me how, explaining, “He likes to be dialed
slowly
.” In Russia, alarm clocks don’t ring, they burst into rooster crowing or songbird calls. My friend Luda had a clock that announced the hours in an old-lady voice: “The time is one o’clock exactly!” Luda referred to the clock as
moya tyotka
, my auntie. When you pass the turnstiles on the St. Petersburg or Moscow metros without paying, there’s not a siren sound, as in New York, but a frantic chirping, as if you’d just trod on some creature’s nest. In Russia the windshield wiper on your car isn’t called a mechanical name—it’s a
dvornik
, a word whose more common meaning is “custodian.” What we call a speed bump in America the Russians call
lezhashchii politseiskii
, which means “lyingdown policeman.”

The animism applies especially to buildings. In Russia a building is regarded as and spoken of not just as itself but as a manifestation of the will of the person who ordered its construction or who held power when it went up. The church I was shown in Vologda, for example—the one constructed at the command of Ivan the Terrible, who denied food to the builders in order to get them to work faster—doesn’t merely evoke the memory of Ivan the Terrible, it
is
, in a sense, Ivan the Terrible. The echo of his capricious and brutal spirit may be said to inhabit it as long as the church stands. And certainly no other individual personality in history has ever occupied a city as thoroughly as Peter the Great occupies St. Petersburg. Pushkin imagined a deathless bronze Peter on his bronze horse chasing citizens down the city’s wide streets. In Peterhof, the palace compound Peter built west of the city, there is to this day a grove of metal trees that can be made to squirt water at unwary passersby just as they used to do in Peter’s time. Whenever a tourist gets soaked, the wild tsar’s laughter resounds in a neighboring dimension, intangible but full of his presence, that hovers all around.

By this metaphysic, the camp I was looking at, and all the camps
along this road, and the road itself, were Stalin. His was the animating spirit of the place. The road project and its camps had come into existence by his fiat, had continued to exist in fear of his will, and had ended like a blown-out match with his death. The fact that the world has not yet decided what to say about Stalin was the reason these camps were standing with no change or context; the sense of absence here was because of that.

The world more or less knows what it thinks of Hitler. Stalin, though, is still beyond us. As time passes, he seems to be sidling into history as one of those old-timey, soft-focus monsters—like Ivan the Terrible, like Peter the Great—whose true monstrosity softens to resemble that of an ogre in a fairy tale. Hitler killed millions, and we have a rough idea how many, but the millions of victims of Stalin are still difficult to count. There were the millions his policies starved, and the million-plus whose executions he brought about, and the millions he sent to death in the camps. Historians estimate that anywhere from fifty-five to more than sixty million Russians died by unnatural causes as a result of the Bolshevik revolution, from its beginning in 1917 to the fall of communism in 1992. A large fraction of those deaths must be blamed on Stalin.

And yet somehow Stalin gets a pass. People know he was horrible, but he has not yet been declared horrible officially. Hitler’s minions were tried and convicted and (some of them) hanged, but the only trials examining the crimes of the Stalin regime were the absurd and obscene show trials he staged to reinforce his power and give himself a cover for murdering more. Perhaps the world has even bought the PR he engineered about himself, with the photos of him holding smiling children on his knee (children whose parents he later killed), those happy photos of him with a twinkle in his eye. The ogre’s twinkle seems to have achieved its purpose. During American elections, TV and other commentators sometimes quoted Stalin’s famous remark, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” As a comparison, is it possible to imagine any commentator under any circumstances quoting a witty remark of Hitler’s? In the 1960s, Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, came to America to live, and was accepted here, and even wrote a bestseller; would any of that have been possible for a daughter of Hitler, or of any famous Nazi? America had to be civil, at least, to Svetlana Alliluyeva; her father had been our ally. He appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine eleven times.

Further complicating the problem is the fact that Stalin’s popularity continues to grow among the Russians themselves. On the subject of the greatest leaders in Russian history, public opinion polls regularly rank him at or near the top. No doubt he benefits from the camouflage provided by Russian leaders who went before; Hitler’s crimes seemed unique in European history, but Stalin could be seen as another bloody tsar, or as an Arakcheev with industrially augmented killing power. Stalin was actually incomparably worse than his predecessors all the way back to Khan Batu, but the illusion of continuity makes him look less bad. On top of that, he killed far and away more Russians—of many ethnicities and regions, but Russians all the same—than he killed foreigners. If now his countrymen, his principal victims, don’t want him and his era brought to account, and are praising him instead . . . well, then what?

Stalin never saw this or any Siberian gulag with his own eyes. Once he had attained power, he seldom left western Russia, preferring to stay in or near the Kremlin most of the time. Perhaps the unhappy fate of every Russian ruler who set foot in Siberia gave him pause. Although he had passed through western Siberia often as a young man (those alleged six escapes), neither then nor afterward was he ever east of Baikal. His underlings must have occasionally shown him charts of this Topolinoe road and its system of prison camps, and maybe they even showed him photographs. But for him this camp would have been only a point on a map, a detail of a plan. The strange feeling of absence that prevailed in the frozen silence here had to do with the secrecy and evil of the place’s conception, and with its permanent abandonment, in shame, after its author was gone. Now the place existed only nominally in present time and space; the abandoned camp was a single preserved thought in a dead man’s mind.

Back in the minibus, I didn’t ask to stop at a prison camp again, though others appeared along the road. I had no desire to explore any more of them. In daylight, the road’s high passes bothered me less than they had at night. Instead my worry now focused on the driver’s father with his dislocated shoulder in the front seat. His fortitude, and the silent contortions of his face every time we went over a bump, made me wince.

When we stopped for a break at a frozen river beneath another log bridge, I took my suitcase out of the back and found my bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol Gelcaps. I shook two into my palm and gave them to the driver and said he should tell his father to take these now. Then I handed him another two and said his father should take these in four hours, per the directions on the bottle. Here a language problem created what became an afternoon of drama for me, though I told no one about it. The Russian phrases for “in four hours” and “at four o’clock” resemble each other, and though I had meant to say the first, I accidentally said the second. The father took the first pair of pills at about three forty-five. Promptly at four o’clock, the son picked the second pair of pills from a small can by his seat, handed them to the father, and the father swallowed them.

This caused me no small anxiety. Should I say something? Would an overdose of this size hurt the old guy? Should I tell them to stop so he could throw up? Would that be an insane American overreaction? I didn’t know. Probably, a double dose of Tylenol, even extra-strength, could not do any serious harm. For the rest of the ride I held my breath and watched. Soon at each bump in the road, the old reindeer herder was swaying forward, swaying back. Sometimes his forehead almost touched the windshield. Sometimes he would slump way down to the side. He always righted himself, though, and kept his stoic dignity. I had to admit that at least he did not seem to be feeling as much pain. By the time we reached Khandyga, in the evening, he had stopped swaying and looked okay, and both he and his son thanked me with big smiles when we said goodbye. I was glad to have no worse outcome to my attempt at doctoring.

Sergei and I again spent the night in the hotel in Khandyga, in the same communal bedroom as before. A local guy with a Uazik was driving us back to Yakutsk the following morning.

The only excitement of that trip happened on the Lena River. Our driver was a skittish, skinny kid who drove fast, kept to no particular lane, and often hit potholes dead-on. Duct tape held the windows in place, the door handles came off in our hands, and the whole vehicle tended to shimmy to the left or right, crabwise. Sergei sat in front and I sat in back with three other passengers—a mother from Khandyga and her thirteen-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter. The ride soon made
the little girl carsick, which caused the driver concern. He was solicitous when he had to stop for her to throw up, and he sometimes screeched into the parking lots of roadside cafés to buy her tea with lemon and sugar for the purpose of soothing her stomach. Then he’d hop back in the car and we’d go racketing off again.

When we turned onto the Lena River, the driver explained that this new route was longer than the previous ice road because there had been an accident on the previous road a month ago—several cars had broken through the ice and six people had drowned. The southbound lane on this new road had a fair amount of irregularities in the ice, and as we were rattling over them the Uazik suddenly sputtered and stopped cold. Traffic backed up behind us immediately with a great honking and roaring that did not let up as people drove around us on the ice. The mother from Khandyga was worried because from here it was several miles to land. I told her not to disquiet herself because Sergei could fix anything. He and the driver were peering under the hood. The driver seemed overwhelmed, but Sergei had taken a piece out of the engine and was strolling on the ice, hunting around.