Kolyma Tales (40 page)

At best only those things that hang close to the stove are well heated. The remainder, blocked from the heat by the closer items, only get damp. Those in the far corner are taken out cold. No lice are killed by this disinfestation chamber. It’s only a formality, and the apparatus has been created for the purpose of tormenting the convict still more.

The doctors understand this very well, but the camp can’t be left without a disinfestation chamber. When the prisoners have spent an additional hour waiting in the large dressing room, totally indistinguishable clothing is dragged out by the armful and thrown on the floor. It is up to each person to locate his clothing. The convict swears and dons padded trousers, jacket, and pea coat – all wet from the steam. Afterward, at night, he will sacrifice his last hours of sleep to attempt to dry his clothing at the barracks stove.

It is not hard to understand why no one likes bathhouse day.

Values shift here, in Kolyma, and any one of our concepts – even though its name may be pronounced in the usual way and spelled with the usual letters – may contain some new element or meaning, something for which there is no equivalent on the mainland. Here everything is judged by different standards: customs and habits are unique, and the meaning of every word has changed.

When it is impossible to describe a new event, feeling, or concept for which ordinary human language has no word, a new term is created, borrowed from the language of the legislator of style and taste in the Far North – the criminal world.

Semantic metamorphoses touch not only such concepts as Love, Family, Honor, Work, Virtue, Vice, Crime, but even words that are quite specific to the world of the Far North and that have been born within its bowels – for example,
ESCAPE
…

In my early youth I read about Kropotkin’s flight, in 1876, from the Fortress of Peter and Paul. His was a classic escape: a daredevil cab at the prison gates, a lady with a revolver under her cape, an exact calculation of the number of steps from the guardhouse door, the prisoner’s sprint under fire, the clatter of horse hooves on the cobblestone pavement.

Later I read memoirs of persons who had been sent to exile in Siberia under the czars. I found their escapes from Yakutia and Verxoyansk bitterly disappointing: a sleigh-ride with horses hitched nose to tail, arrival at the train station, purchase of a ticket at the ticket window… I could never understand why this was called an ‘escape’. Such escapes were once called ‘unwarranted absence from place of residence’, and I believe that this was a far more accurate description than the romantic word ‘flight’. Even the escape of the Social Revolutionary Zenzinov did not give the feeling of a real escape like Kropotkin’s. An American yacht simply approached the boat on which Zenzinov was fishing and took him on board.

There were always plenty of escape attempts in Kolyma, and they were all unsuccessful, because of the particularly severe nature of the polar region, which the czarist government never attempted to colonize with convicts – as it did Sakhalin.

Distances to the mainland ran into thousands of miles; the nearest settlements were those surrounding the mines of Far Northern Construction and Aldan, and we were separated from them by a taiga vacuum of six hundred miles.

True, the distance to America was significantly shorter. At its narrowest point, the Bering Strait is only fifty-five miles wide, but the border was so heavily guarded as to be absolutely impassable.

The main escape route led to Yakutsk. From there travel had to be either by water or on horseback. There were no planes in those days, but even so it would have been a simple matter to lock up the planes reliably.

It is understandable that there were no escape attempts in the winter; all convicts (and not only convicts) dream fervently of spending the winter under a roof next to a cast-iron stove.

Spring presents an unbearable temptation; it is always that way. To the compelling meteorological factor is added the power of cold logic. A trip through the taiga is possible only during the summer, when it is possible to eat grass, mushrooms, berries, roots, or pancakes baked from moss flour, to catch field mice, chipmunks, squirrels, jays, rabbits…

No matter how cold the summer nights are in the north, in the land of the permafrost, no experienced man will catch cold if he sleeps on a rock, makes a mattress of grass or branches, avoids sleeping on his back, and changes position regularly from one side to the other.

The choice of Kolyma as a camp location was a brilliant one, because of the impossibility of escape. Nevertheless, here as everywhere, the power of illusion is strong, and the price of such an illusion is paid in bitter days spent in punishment cells, additional sentences, beatings, hunger, and frequently death.

There were many escape attempts, which always began when the first emeralds colored the fingernails of the larches.

The convicts who tried to escape were almost always newcomers serving their first year, men in whose hearts freedom and vanity had not yet been annihilated, men whose reason had not yet come to grips with Far North conditions so different from those of the mainland. Until then the mainland was, after all, the only world that they had known. Distressed to the very depths of their souls by everything they saw, the beatings, torture, mockery, degradation, these newcomers fled – some more efficiently, others less – but all came to the same end. Some were caught in two days, others in a week, still others in two weeks…

At first there were no long sentences for escaped prisoners. Ultimately, however, they were tried under Point 14 of Article 58 of the Criminal Code. Escape is a refusal to work and is therefore counter-revolutionary sabotage. Ten years was thus to become the minimal ‘supplementary’ sentence for an escape attempt. Repeated attempts were punished with twenty-five years. This frightened no one, nor did it lessen the number of escape attempts or of burglaries. But all that was to come later.

The enormous staff of camp guards with their thousands of German shepherds combined efforts with the border patrol and the vast army stationed in Kolyma and masquerading under the title ‘The Kolyma Regiment’. Together, these groups had more than enough manpower to catch one hundred out of every hundred escapees.

How could escape be possible, and wouldn’t it have been simpler to beef up the camp guards rather than hunt down those who had already escaped?

Economic considerations justify maintaining a staff of ‘headhunters’, since this is cheaper than setting up a ‘deadbolt’ system of the prison variety. It is extraordinarily difficult to prevent the escape itself. Even the gigantic network of informers recruited from the prisoners themselves and paid with cheap cigarettes and soup is inadequate.

This is a question of human psychology with its twists and turns, and it is impossible to foresee who will attempt an escape, or when, or why. What happens is often quite different from that which might have been expected.

Of course, all sorts of preventive measures can be taken – arrests, imprisonment in those prisons within prisons that are called ‘punishment zones’, transfers of ‘suspicious’ prisoners from one place to another. Many such measures have been worked out, and they probably lessen the number of escapes. There would have been even more attempts had it not been for these punishment zones situated deep in the taiga under heavy guard.

People do manage to escape even from punishment zones, however, while no one attempts to escape from unguarded work sites. Anything can happen in camp.

Spring is a time of preparation. More guards and dogs are sent in, and additional training and special instructions are the rule. As for the prisoners, they also prepare – hiding tins of food and dried bread, selecting ‘partners’.

There is a single example of a classic escape from Kolyma, carefully prepared and executed in a brilliant, methodical fashion. It is the exception that proves the rule. Even in this escape, however, a tiny insignificant thread was left that led back to the escapee – even though the search took two years. Evidently it was a question of the professional pride of the investigators, Vidokov and Lekokov, and considerably greater attention, effort, and money were spent on it than was normally done.

It is curious that the escapee who demonstrated such energy and wit was neither a ‘political’ nor a professional criminal, either of whom might have been expected to specialize in such affairs. He was an embezzler with a ten-year sentence.

Even this is understandable. An escape by a ‘political’ is always related to the mood of the ‘outside’ and – like a hunger strike in prison – draws its strength from its connection with the outside. A prisoner must know, and know well in advance, the eventual goal of his escape. What goal could any political have had in 1937? People whose political connections are accidental and insignificant do not flee from prison. They might try to escape to their family and friends, but in 1938 that would have involved bringing repressive measures down on the heads of anyone whom the escapee might have seen on the street.

In such instances there was no getting off with fifteen or twenty years. The political would have been a threat to the very lives of his friends and family. Someone would have had to conceal him, render him assistance. None of the politicals in 1938 tried to escape.

The few men who actually served out their sentences and returned home found that their own wives checked the correctness and legality of their release papers and raced their neighbors to the police station to announce their husbands’ arrival.

Reprisals taken upon innocent persons were quite simple. Instead of being reprimanded or issued a warning, they were tortured and then sentenced to ten or twenty years of prison or hard labor. All that was left to such persons was death. And they died with no thought of escape, displaying once more that national quality of passivity glorified by the poet Tiutchev and shamelessly exploited on later occasions by politicians of all levels.

The professional criminals made no attempts to escape because they did not believe they could succeed in returning to the mainland. Moreover, experienced employees of the camp police and the Criminal Investigation Service claim to have a sixth sense that enables them to recognize professional criminals. It is as if the criminal were stamped with the indelible mark of Cain. The most eloquent example of the existence of this sixth sense occurred during a month-long search for an armed robber and murderer. The search was being conducted along the roads of Kolyma, and an order was issued that he be shot on sight.

The detective, Sevastyanov, stopped a stranger in a sheepskin coat standing beside a tank at a filling-station. When the man turned around, Sevastyanov shot him in the forehead. Sevastyanov had never seen the bandit, who was fully dressed in winter clothing. It is impossible to examine tattoos on every passer-by, and the description given to Sevastyanov was very vague. The photograph was so inadequate that it too was of little assistance. In spite of all this, Sevastyanov’s intuition did not fail him.

A sawed-off shotgun fell from beneath the dead man’s coat, and a Browning pistol was found in his pocket. He had more than enough identification papers.

How should we regard this positive proof of a sixth sense? Another minute, and Sevastyanov himself would have been shot. But what if he had killed an innocent man?

The criminals had neither the strength nor the desire to return to the mainland. Having weighed all the pros and cons, they decided not to take any chances but to limit their activities to reorganizing their lives in this new environment. This was, of course, a rational decision. The thugs viewed escape attempts as bold adventures, but unnecessary risks.

Who would make a run for it? A peasant? A priest? I met only one priest who had attempted to escape – and that was before the famous meeting where Patriarch Sergei handed Bullitt, the first American ambassador, a list of all Orthodox priests serving sentences throughout the Soviet Union. Patriarch Sergei had had the opportunity to acquaint himself with the cells of Butyr Prison when he was Metropolitan. As a result of Roosevelt’s intervention, all members of the clergy were released in a body from imprisonment and exile. The intention was to arrange a certain ‘concordat’ with the church – an essential step in view of the approaching war.

Perhaps it would be a common criminal who would attempt to escape – a child-molester, an embezzler, a bribe-taker, a murderer? But there was no sense in these people’s attempting to escape, since their sentences (which were called ‘terms’ in Dostoevsky’s time) were short, and they were given easy service jobs. In general they had no difficulty in obtaining positions of privilege in the camp administration. Workdays were generously credited to them and – most important – they were well treated when they returned to their home towns and villages. This kindness could not be explained away as the Russian people’s capacity to pity the ‘unfortunate’. That attitude had long since become a thing of the past, a charming fairy tale. Times had changed, and the great discipline of the new society demanded that ‘the simple people’ copy the attitude of the authorities in such matters. This attitude was usually favorable, since common criminals did not trouble the government. Only ‘Trotskyites’ and ‘enemies of the people’ were to be hated.

There was another significant factor that might explain the indifference of the populace to those who had returned from the prisons. So many people had spent time in prison that there probably was not a family in the country in which some family member or friend had not been ‘repressed’. Once the saboteurs had been eliminated, it was the turn of the well-to-do peasants, who were called
kulaks
(the term meaning ‘fist’). After the
kulaks
came the ‘Trotskyites’, and the ‘Trotskyites’ were followed by persons with German surnames. Then a crusade against the Jews was on the point of being declared. All this reduced people to total indifference toward anyone who had been marked by any part of the criminal code.