Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (48 page)

With the help of Peshkov, Lina was able to visit Georgy that August, sharing a cabin on a boat anchored along the island shore. When she left, Lina was pregnant. She managed to make a second visit a little more than a year later in October 1929, around the time her family was being expelled from Moscow. Georgy’s situation was extremely tenuous at the time, and what transpired over the subsequent days remains unclear, although the end result is beyond doubt. According to Lina’s brother Sergei, shortly before Lina’s arrival Georgy had been confined to a small cell for the crime of giving a dying priest a bit of bread and wine for one final communion. The camp officials agreed to let Georgy out of the cell during Lina’s visit, but on one condition: that he not mention to her that he had just been sentenced to death. Sergei wrote that these few days together were among the happiest of Lina’s life. Fellow prisoner Dmitry Likhachev saw them walking arm in arm, she a beautiful, elegant brunette, he happy, with a mildly ironic expression. Georgy, according to Likhachev, kept his word and never did tell his wife. Lina left confident they would make it through his six-year sentence and then finally be together for good, even if that meant exile in some remote part of the country.

Here is how Solzhenitsyn recounts this final visit:

One time Osorgin was scheduled to be shot. And that very day his young wife (and he himself was not yet forty
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) disembarked on the wharf there. And Osorgin begged the jailers not to spoil his wife’s visit for her. He promised that he would not let her stay more than three days and that they could shoot him as soon as she left. And here is the kind of self-control this meant, the sort of thing we have forgotten because of the anathema we have heaped on the aristocracy, we who whine at every petty misfortune and every petty pain. For three days he never left his wife’s side, and he had to keep her from guessing the situation! He must not hint at it even in one single phrase! He must not allow his spirits to quaver. He must not allow his eyes to darken. Just once (his wife is alive and she remembers it now), when they were walking along the Holy Lake, she turned and saw that her husband had clutched his head in torment. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing,” he answered instantly. She could have stayed still longer, but he begged her to leave. As the steamer pulled away from the wharf, he was already undressing to be shot.

This last part appears to be artistic embellishment, for we do not know for certain when Georgy was shot. The sources disagree on the exact date, ranging from October 16 to 29. We do know that on one of those nights, Georgy and some of the other prisoners were called out of their barracks and marched out to the local cemetery and shot. Some accounts cite forty prisoners killed; others, four hundred. The stated reason for the executions was the inmates’ failure to inform the camp bosses of a planned escape attempt. As he walked to his death, Georgy sang “Christ Is Risen” and prayed aloud with the other men alongside him. The bodies were dumped in a common grave; a few of the victims were still alive when the dirt was shoveled over them. The head of the execution squad, Dmitry Uspensky, was drunk at the time and had fired wildly at the men with his Nagant. Likhachev saw him the next morning washing the blood from his boots. In 1988, Likhachev returned to Solovki and found the site of the execution. A small house had been built upon it. Digging in the dirt around the foundation, he came across bone fragments. He met the residents, who told him that when they harvested the potatoes in their kitchen garden, they sometimes pulled up human skulls.
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Lina learned of Georgy’s murder soon after. She found a priest willing to conduct a secret service for Georgy in a Moscow church, but when they got there, they noticed a number of other people and turned back out of fear. The impossibility of properly mourning for her husband compounded Lina’s grief. About this time the Osorgin family received permission to leave the Soviet Union for France. Lina said goodbye to her family and went with them.
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21

THE MOUSE, THE KEROSENE, AND THE MATCH

In 1931, two years after being exiled from Moscow, the Golitsyns moved from Kotovo to Dmitrov, an ancient Russian town sixty-five kilometers north of the capital on River Yakhroma. Dmitrov was a pleasant place with old stone houses and several fine churches, and its proximity to Moscow made it convenient for families like the Golitsyns who needed to visit but could no longer legally reside there. The quiet life of the town was about to be swept away, however, when in a few years Dmitrov became the center of the largest slave labor project in the Soviet Union.

Two hundred years earlier, Peter the Great had envisioned constructing a canal to link the Moscow and Volga rivers. It was a hydrological scheme of pharaonic scale that, not surprisingly, was never realized. But such gargantuan projects captured the spirit of the First Five-Year Plan, and in June 1931 the Central Executive Committee approved the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal. It was initially put under the direction of the People’s Commissariat of Water, but given the slow speed of the work, largely because of the lack of manpower, it was transferred to the OGPU the following year. In September 1932, Dmitlag was established to provide the necessary workforce for the Moscow-Volga Canal. Dmitlag, short for Dmitrov Corrective Labor Camp, became the largest branch of the entire gulag system over the next few years as prisoners from camps across the country were transferred there to meet the enormous demand for labor. Its size
(covering a good portion of the entire Moscow region) and population grew so quickly that the camp administration lost control over its numbers. How many men and women labored at Dmitlag is still not known, although the writer, poet, and gulag survivor Varlam Shalamov estimated the camp was home to 1.2 million people in 1933. When it was finished in 1937, the Stalin Moscow-Volga Canal stretched almost eighty miles, connecting the capital to the mighty Volga and so providing the land-locked city access to five seas: the White and Baltic to the north, the Black, Caspian, and Azov to the south. Moscow, it was said, had become the “Port of the Five Seas.”
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For the first several years work on the canal was largely done without the use of heavy machinery. The canal and its many locks, reservoirs, and hydropower stations were almost entirely built with shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, and human sweat. Like some vast ant colony, armies of prison laborers swarmed over the land, digging, drilling, hauling, and dumping. The best workers received six hundred grams of bread a day; most were given only four hundred, while those being punished had to survive on three hundred. Countless thousands died. Some starved to death; some drowned or were accidentally buried in concrete, their bodies never recovered. Some were taken out at night after their shifts and shot in the woods. One of the camp bosses liked to strip recalcitrant prisoners bare in the winter and leave them to freeze in the snow.
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The canal project was run by Lazar Kogan, head of Moscow-Volga Construction, and Semyon Firin, head of Dmitlag (from September 1933). Dmitlag’s offices were in a former monastery, which had been converted into a museum after the revolution. The staff had dared protest the closure of the museum, and so the OGPU arrested them. For Firin, previously the boss of Belbaltlag (the White Sea–Baltic Sea Camp), Dmitlag was not just about canal building but was part of a larger project of remaking Soviet man, what was known at the time as reforging. The canal was meant to change not only the country but also the people who built it: through the process of labor the prisoners would shed their flawed selves and be reborn—reforged—as new men worthy of their Soviet homeland. Firin saw himself as more than a jailer (even if on a mass scale): he was a maker of men, an arbiter of culture. Like some minor potentate, he created his own court. In the evenings he hosted a salon at his dacha for poets, writers, and other talented prisoners.
He set up a Cultural-Educational Division at the camp and a theater and an orchestra staffed with prisoners; he searched the entire gulag for the most accomplished singers, musicians, and performers and had them transferred to Dmitlag. Artists were kept busy making posters and banners, and Dmitlag published more than fifty newspapers with titles like
Reforging
and
Moscow-Volga
that carried articles with instructive headlines such as “Learn to Relax” and “Drown Your Past on the Bottom of the Canal.” Social and political leaders, artists, and journalists came from all over the USSR and abroad to behold the miracle taking place at Dmitlag and wonder at “Bolshevik power’s infinite ability to remake man.” Stalin himself visited Dmitlag three times.
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In the bizarre world of Dmitlag, freedom and captivity were not always distinct, however. Consider the case of Professor Nikolai Nekrasov, the last governor-general of Finland before the revolution and a former minister in the Provisional Government. An excellent engineer, he had been arrested several times, most recently in 1930, when he was sentenced to ten years. He was brought to Dmitlag as an inmate specialist, yet was given his own newly constructed house in the “the free sector” along with a car and driver. He was released in 1935 but chose to stay on and worked at Dmitlag until the project was finished. In 1940, he was arrested for a final time and then shot.

Nekrasov’s story was not unique. In the mid-1930s, after spending several years in the camps, Galina von Meck and her husband, Dmitry Orlovsky (she had remarried after her first husband, Nicholas, had been shot as an enemy of the people during the Great Break), found themselves unemployed, and unemployable. Desperate, Dmitry accepted a job working for the OGPU as a statistician on the canal works near Rybinsk. One of the perquisites of the job was personal servants drawn from the inmate population. Called slaves, they were assigned to families to do manual labor about the house. “We, who had been prisoners like these poor people a year or two before,” Galina observed, “enjoyed the privilege of being served by those who were our former comrades.” Despite their shared experiences, the two sides were not permitted to socialize or even be friendly with each other, and people watched to make certain this rule was followed. The comfortable life at Dmitlag did not last long, however. After being let go from his position in 1938, Dmitry was arrested again and disappeared. “Farewell and forgive me” were his last words to Galina.
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Many former people came to work at Dmitlag, some voluntarily, some having been sent there from other camps. The need for specialists was so great that engineers and others with the required technical skills were purposely arrested, charged with Article 58, and then sent to Dmitlag to work. (Article 58, divided into fourteen separate sections, referred to part of the criminal code of 1926, and its subsequent iterations, that outlined all counterrevolutionary crimes against the state. Its widespread use in the repression of the Stalin years made it notorious.
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)

Vladimir Golitsyn was one of the artists who found work at Dmitlag. In the autumn of 1932, he was hired to decorate the hall in a local school for a ball marking the fifteenth anniversary of the OGPU. After he had finished, the former aristocrat who had witnessed the balls of tsarist Russia stayed to watch. The Gulag Ball kicked off with a number of long speeches in praise of the secret police and its “iron cohort,” filled with fond recollections of the early days of the Cheka in the bloody aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. These were followed by the “Artistic Portion” of the evening, featuring a choir of Ukrainian kulaks, balalaika music, and various soloists, all of them camp prisoners. And then it was time to dance. The OGPU Brass Band roared to life, and one of the camp commandants pranced to the center of the hall, clapped loudly for silence, and cried out, “The Ladies’ Waltz!” With that, he grabbed hold of a blond girl (a camp typist) and set about spinning her around the hall, stomping his spurs as he went. Vladimir watched for about an hour and then went home. “A rather wretched affair,” he wrote that night in his diary. “Sadness.”
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Depressing as this entertainment was, Vladimir was nonetheless able to find humor in the absurdity of their lives, and his diaries and letters are filled with observations on the strange world they inhabited in Dmitrov. He recorded the story of a prisoner who had the good fortune to purchase a winning lottery ticket, only to discover he could not collect the prize: a trip around the world. Vladimir copied down the various signs and banners posted about Dmitlag: “A slogan emblazoned on the archway at the entrance to the camp: ‘The Moscow-Volga Canal—Creation of the Second Five-Year Plan and the Classless Society.’ ” He took special delight in a sign posted in one of the lavatories: “Red Army men! Learn to control your a[sses]! Make sure you sh[it] straight into the toilet!!” Once he was commissioned to create a poster
titled “Socially Harmful Women in Freedom and in the Camps of the NKVD.” He drew a series of women getting drunk, stealing, killing, gambling, fighting, and the like. As he worked, his children gathered around to watch. Little Lariusha pointed to a streetwalker and asked what she was doing wrong. “Can’t you see?” his elder brother knowingly informed him. “She’s smoking.”
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Dmitry and Andrei Gudovich also came to Dmitrov. Dmitry had spent the past three years as a prisoner in Karelia working on the Belbalt Canal; Andrei was returning from Siberian exile. Both found work at Dmitlag, Dmitry in one of the design bureaus. They visited the Golitsyns often, and Vladimir enjoyed their company. He remembered gathering one June day to celebrate Yelena’s name day. They pulled down two guitars from the wall and began singing the fox-trots they had danced to years ago in Moscow. To Vladimir’s surprise, they all also knew the words to the songs of the Red Army from the civil war. Dmitry sang these better than anyone. “You have to spend a good eight years in the camps as he has,” Vladimir observed, “in order to sing like that. Of course, his renditions are rather refined, but this gives them a special charm.”
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