Kolyma Tales (24 page)

Rubantsev had signed a contract and had been warned that the prisoners were his enemies. Being a man of independent mind, however, he soon saw that he had been lied to during his ‘political’ preparation. Rogues, embezzlers, slanderers, and loafers were his colleagues at the hospital. It was the prisoners with their many skills (including medicine) who ran the hospital. Rubantsev realized where the truth lay, and he was not about to hide it. He applied to be transferred to Magadan, where there was a high school for his son. He was denied the transfer orally. After considerable effort, he managed to send his son to a boarding-school fifty miles from Debin. This took several months, and by that time he was running his ward confidently and dismissing loafers and thieves. News of these threatening activities was immediately sent to Scherbakov’s office in Magadan.

Scherbakov didn’t like to stand on ceremony with his subordinates. Cursing, threats, and prison sentences worked fine with prisoners, but they wouldn’t do for a former frontline surgeon who had received medals in the war and who was working under contract.

Scherbakov dug up Rubantsev’s old application and had him transferred to Magadan. And although the academic year had already begun and the surgical ward was working smoothly, he had to abandon everything…

Rubantsev left, and three days later a drunken party was held in the treatment room. Even the principal doctor, Kovalyov, and the hospital director, Vinokurov, helped themselves to the surgical alcohol. They hadn’t visited the surgical ward earlier, because they were afraid of Rubantsev. Drunken parties began in all the doctors’ offices, and nurses and cleaning women were invited. In a word, there were a lot of changes. Secondary adhesion began to occur in operations in the surgical ward, since precious grain alcohol could not be wasted on patients. Half-drunk hospital officials strolled back and forth through the ward.

This was my hospital. After I finished my courses in 1946, I was sent here with a group of patients. The hospital grew before my eyes. It had been a regimental headquarters formerly, but after the war a specialist on camouflage had judged it unsuitable because of its prominent location. Indeed, it could be seen for tens of miles, and so it was converted into a prison hospital. On leaving the three-story building, the former owners, the Kolyma Regiment, had ripped out all the plumbing and sewer pipes. All the chairs in the auditorium had been burned in the boiler. The walls were full of holes, and the doors were broken. The Kolyma Regiment had left Russian-style. We had to repair everything – screw by screw, brick by brick.

The doctors and assistants were doing their best to do a good job. For many of them it was a sacred duty – to pay for their medical education by helping people.

All the loafers raised their heads when Rubantsev left.

‘Why are you stealing alcohol from the medicine cabinets?’

‘Go to hell,’ a nurse answered me. ‘Thank God that Rubantsev is gone, and Lunin is in charge now.’

I was amazed and depressed at Lunin’s conduct. The party continued.

At the next brief meeting, Lunin laughed at Rubantsev: ‘He didn’t do a single ulcer operation. And he’s supposed to be a surgeon.’

This was nothing new. It was true that Rubantsev hadn’t done any ulcer operations. The patients in the therapeutic wards who had this diagnosis were emaciated, undernourished prisoners who didn’t have the slightest chance of surviving the operation. ‘The background isn’t right,’ Rubantsev would say.

‘He’s a coward,’ Lunin shouted and transferred twelve such patients to his ward from the therapeutic ward. All twelve were operated on, and all twelve died. The hospital doctors remembered Rubantsev’s experience and kindness.

‘Sergei Mixailovich, this is no way to work.’

‘Don’t tell me what to do!’

I made up a report asking that a commission be sent from Magadan. I was transferred to a tree-cutting group in the forest. They wanted to send me to a penal mine, but the senior official of the local Party chapter talked them out of it: ‘This isn’t ’38 anymore. It’s not worth the risk.’

A commission was sent, and Lunin was ‘fired’ by Far Northern Construction. Instead of three years, he only had to serve one and a half.

A year later, when the hospital administration had been replaced, I returned from my paramedic job in the forest to take charge of admitting patients to the hospital.

Once, in Moscow, I met the descendant of a Decembrist. We didn’t say hallo.

Sixteen years later I learned that Edith Abramovna had gotten Lunin reinstated in his job at Far Northern Construction. She had gone with him to the Chukotka Peninsula, to the village of Pevek. Here they talked things out for the last time, and Edith Abramovna died; she drowned herself in the Pevek River.

Sometimes my tranquilizers don’t work, and I wake up at night. I remember the past and a woman’s beautiful face; I hear her deep voice: ‘Sergei, is this your friend?’

The pages of Russian history written in ’37 and ’38 contain lyrical as well as tragic lines, and the handwriting of those lines is rather unusual. Butyr Prison is an enormous edifice whose numerous basements, towers and wings are filled to overflowing with prisoners under investigation. It is a devil’s dance of arrests, shipments of prisoners who know neither what they are accused of nor the length of their sentences, of cells packed with prisoners who have not yet perished. In this complicated life a curious tradition has grown up, a tradition that has survived for decades.

The disease of ‘vigilance’, whose seeds were widely sown, had grown into a spy mania and laid hold of the entire country. In the investigators’ offices a sinister, secret meaning was attached to every trifling remark, every slip of the tongue.

The prison authorities’ contribution consisted of forbidding prisoners under investigation to receive any clothing or food packages. Sages of jurisprudence maintained that two French rolls, five apples and a pair of old pants were enough to transmit any text into the prison – even a fragment of
Anna Karenina
.

Such ‘messages from the free world’ – an invention of the inflamed minds of diligent bureaucrats – were effectively prevented. A regulation was issued that only money could be sent, and it had to be in round figures of ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty rubles; thus, numbers could not be used to work out a new ‘alphabet’ of messages.

It would have been simpler and more reliable to forbid anything at all to be sent into the prisons, but this measure was reserved for the investigators. They could, ‘in the interest of the investigation’, forbid anything to be sent to a particular prisoner. There was also a commercial side to the question: Butyr Prison’s commissary or ‘shop’ increased its sales many times over after clothing and food packages were forbidden.

For some reason, the administration could not make up its mind to reject all assistance from relatives and acquaintances, even though they were certain that such an action would cause no protest either within the prison or without.

Russians do not like to bear witness in court about infringements of the ephemeral rights of prisoners under investigation. The witness in a Russian trial is, by tradition, only barely distinguishable from the defendant, and his ‘involvement’ in the matter may serve as a black mark against him in the future. The situation of prisoners under investigation is still worse. They will all eventually serve sentences, for ‘Caesar’s wife is perfect,’ and the Ministry of Internal Affairs does not make mistakes. No one is arrested without due cause, and sentencing is an inevitable sequel to arrest. Whether the prisoner under investigation receives a heavy or a light sentence depends partly on ‘luck’ and partly on a tangled web of factors which include the bedbugs that tormented the investigator on the night before the trial and the voting in the American Congress.

In essence, there is only one way out of those prisons where preliminary investigations are conducted – via the ‘black raven’, the prison bus that takes convicted prisoners to the train station. At the station, prisoners are loaded into freight cars that have been adapted to carry people. From there the innumerable prison cars begin their slow journey,
en route
to the thousands of ‘labor’ camps.

This doom-laden atmosphere puts its stamp on the conduct of prisoners under investigation. Cheerfulness and bravado are replaced by gloomy pessimism and a weakening of morale. At the interrogations the prisoner struggles with a ghost, a ghost possessing the strength of a giant. The prisoner is accustomed to dealing with reality, but now he must battle with a shadow. But this shadow is a ‘fire that burns, a spear that draws blood’. Everything is terrifyingly real, except the ‘case’ itself. His nerves strained to the breaking-point, the prisoner is crushed in his struggle with fantastic phantoms of incredible stature, and he loses the will to resist. He signs everything the investigator has invented and from that moment himself becomes a figure in the unreal world with which he earlier struggled. He is transformed into a pawn in a terrible, dark, bloody game played out in the investigators’ offices.

‘Where did they take him?’

‘To Lefortovo Prison. To sign.’

Prisoners under investigation know they are doomed. The camps always had more than their share of prisoners under investigation; sentencing in no way exempted the prisoner from all the other articles of the criminal code. They remained ‘in effect’, just as they had outside the prison walls – except that here all the accusations, punishments, and interrogations were still more brazen, still more fantastic in their crudeness.

When clothing and food packages were forbidden in the capital, the ‘outlying districts’ – the camps – introduced a special ration for prisoners under investigation: a mug of water and 300 grams of bread (two-thirds of a pound). These were punishment-cell conditions, and they quickly edged prisoners under investigation closer to their graves. This ‘investigatory ration’ was used to obtain the ‘best evidence of all’ – the accused’s personal confession.

In 1957, Butyr Prison permitted prisoners to receive up to fifty old-style rubles (about five dollars) a month. Anyone with money credited to his account could use it to buy food at the prison ‘shop’. ‘Shop days’ were held once a week, and up to thirteen rubles could be spent on each occasion. If the prisoner possessed more money on his person when he was arrested, it was credited to his account, but he could not spend more than fifty rubles a month. Of course, receipts were issued instead of cash, and the amount remaining was noted by the shop assistant on the back of these receipts in red ink.

Contact with prison authorities and comradely discipline had been maintained from time immemorial by a system of cell leaders elected by the prisoners themselves. Before each ‘shop day’ the prison administration would issue the cell leader a slate tablet and a piece of chalk. The cell leader used the tablet to list all purchases which the inmates of the cell wished to make. Usually the front of the tablet listed all the separate items and the quantity desired by each individual. The total quantities ordered were indicated on the reverse side.

This activity usually took a whole day, since prison life is filled to overflowing with all sorts of events, and in the eyes of the prisoners the scale by which these events are evaluated is one of high seriousness. On the following morning the cell leader would take one or two inmates with him and go to the commissary to collect the purchases. The remainder of the day would pass in sorting out the different food items, weighing and dividing them according to ‘individual orders’.

The prison store boasted a large selection of food: butter, sausage, cheeses, white rolls, cigarettes, cheap tobacco…

Once established, the prison rations never changed. If a prisoner forgot the day of the week, he could recognize it by the smell of the lunch-time soup or the taste of the only dish served for supper. Pea soup was always served for lunch on Mondays, and supper was wheat kasha. On Tuesdays it was millet soup for lunch and pearl-barley kasha for supper. In six months each prison dish was served exactly twenty-five times. The food of Butyr Prison was famed for its variety.

Anyone who had money could spend at least thirteen rubles four times a month to supplement the watery prison soup and pearl barley (referred to as ‘shrapnel’) with something more tasty, more nutritious, more useful.

Prisoners who didn’t have money could not, of course, make any purchases at all. There were always people in the cell – and not just one or two – who did not have a single kopeck. There might be someone from another city who had been arrested on the street and whose arrest was classified as ‘top secret’. His wife would rush from one prison to another, from one police station to another in a vain attempt to learn her husband’s address. She would take a package from one prison to another; if they accepted it, that meant her husband was alive. If they did not accept it, anxious nights awaited her.

Or the man arrested without money might be the head of a family. Immediately after the arrest they would force his wife, children, and relatives to denounce him. By tormenting him with constant interrogations from the moment of arrest, the investigator would attempt to force a ‘confession’ of an act that the man had never committed. As an additional means of intimidation, aside from threats and beatings, the prisoner might be denied money.

Relatives and acquaintances were justifiably afraid to go to the prison with packages. Anyone who insisted on having his package accepted or on a search for the missing person would raise suspicion. Undesirable consequences at work or even arrest could result. Such things happened.

There was yet another type of convict without money. Lyonka was in cell 68. He was seventeen years old and came from the Tumsk region of the Moscow Oblast – in the thirties a very rural area. Lyonka was chubby, had a white face and unhealthy skin that had not known fresh air for a long time. Lyonka felt great in prison. He was fed there as he had never been fed in his entire life. Almost everyone treated him to something from the prison store. Instead of home-grown tobacco, he learned to smoke
papirosy
– cigarettes attached to a short cardboard mouthpiece. He was delighted by everything – at how interesting it was here and how nice the people were! This illiterate teenager from the Tumsk Region had discovered an entire world. He considered his case to be some sort of game, a kind of craziness, and he couldn’t have cared less about it. His only worry was how to extend for ever his investigation and his life in this prison where there was so much food and everything was so clean and warm.