Kolyma Tales (43 page)

‘All right, come closer.’

The prisoner would approach him.

‘Decided to take a stroll? That’s fine, just fine!’

‘Forgive me, Ivan Spiridonych.’

‘I’ll forgive you,’ Nesterov would say in a solemn sing-song voice as he got up from his seat on the porch. ‘I’ll forgive you, but the state won’t forgive…’

His blue eyes would become milky and lined with red veins. His voice, however, remained kind and well disposed.

‘Take your pick – a smack or isolation.’

‘A smack, Ivan Spiridonych.’

Nesterov’s hairy fist would soar at the head of the happy convict, who would wipe away the blood and spit out his broken teeth.

‘Get off to the barracks!’

Nesterov could knock anyone off his feet with one punch, and he prided himself on this famous talent. The returned prisoner too would consider the arrangement to his advantage, since his punishment went no further than Nesterov’s punch.

If the prisoner refused to resolve the matter family-style and insisted on the official punishment, he was locked up in an isolation cell with an iron floor, where two or three months of reduced rations was considerably worse than Nesterov’s ‘smack’.

If the escaped prisoner survived, there were no other unpleasant consequences – aside from the fact that he could no longer count on being lucky when prisoners were being selected for release to ‘unload’ camp.

As the camps grew, the number of escapes also increased, and simply hiring more guards was not effective. It was too expensive, and at that time very few people were interested in the job of camp guard. The question of responsibility for an escape attempt was being resolved in an inadequate, childish fashion.

Soon a new resolution was announced from Moscow: the days a convict spent on the run and the period he passed in a punishment cell after capture were not to be counted into his basic sentence.

This order caused considerable discontent in Bookkeeping. They had to increase personnel, for such complex arithmetical calculations were too much for our camp accountants.

The order was implemented and read aloud to the entire camp during head counts.

Alas, it did not frighten the would-be escapees at all.

Every day the ‘escaped’ column grew in the reports of the company commanders, and the camp director frowned more and more as he read these daily reports.

Kapitonov, a musician in the camp band, was one of the camp director’s favorites. He walked out of the camp, using his gleaming cornet as if it were a pass, and left the instrument hanging on the branch of a fir. At that point the camp head lost his composure altogether.

In late fall three convicts were killed during an escape. After the bodies were identified, the head of the camp ordered that they be exhibited for three days beside the camp gates – so that everyone had to pass them when leaving for work. But even this unofficial sharp reminder neither stopped nor even lessened the number of escapes.

All this took place toward the end of the twenties. Later came the notorious ‘reforging’ of men’s souls and the White Sea Canal. The ‘concentration camps’ were renamed ‘Corrective Labor Camps’, the number of prisoners grew exponentially, and escapes were treated as separate crimes: Article 82 of the 1926 criminal code laid down a punishment of one year, to be added on to the basic sentence.

All this took place on the mainland, but in Kolyma – a camp that had existed since 1932 – the question of escapees was dealt with only in 1938. From then on, the punishment for an escape was increased, and the ‘term’ was expanded to three years.

Why are the Kolyma years 1932–7 not included in the chronicle of escapes? At that time the camps were run by Edward Berzin. He had founded the Kolyma camp system and was the supreme authority where Party activity, governmental affairs and union matters were concerned. He was executed in 1938 and ‘rehabilitated’ in 1956. The former secretary of Dzerzhinsky and commander of a division of Latvian soldiers who exposed the famous conspiracy of Lokkar, Edward Berzin attempted – not without success – to solve the problem of colonizing this severe and isolated region and the allied problem of reforging the souls of the convicts. A man with a ten-year sentence could accumulate enough work credits to be released in two or three years. Under Berzin there was excellent food, a workday of four to six hours in the winter and ten in the summer, and colossal salaries for convicts, which permitted them to help their families and return to the mainland as well-to-do men when their sentences were up. Berzin did not believe in the possibility of reforging the professional criminals, since he knew their base, untrustworthy human material all too well. It was extremely difficult for professional criminals to be sent to Kolyma in the early years. Those who did succeed in being sent there never regretted it afterward.

The cemeteries dating back to those days are so few in number that the early residents of Kolyma seemed immortal to those who came later. No one attempted to escape from Kolyma at that time; it would have been insane…

Those few years are the golden age of Kolyma. The horrible Yezhov, who was a true enemy of the people, spoke indignantly of the period at one of the meetings of the Central Committee shortly before unleashing his own wave of terror that was to be christened the ‘Yezhovshchina’.

It was in 1938 that Kolyma was transformed into a special camp for recidivists and Trotskyites, and escapes began to be punished with three-year sentences.

‘Why did you escape? You couldn’t have had a compass or a map?’

‘We did it anyway. Alexander promised to be our guide…’

They were being held at a transit prison. There were three of them who had unsuccessfully tried to escape: Nicholas Karev, a twenty-five-year-old former Leningrad journalist, Fyodor Vasiliev, a bookkeeper from Rostov who was the same age, and Alexander Kotelnikov, a Kamchatka Eskimo and reindeer-driver who had been arrested for stealing government property. Kotelnikov must have been about fifty years old, but he could have been a lot older, since it is hard to tell the age of a Yakut, Kamchadal, or Evenk. Kotelnikov spoke good Russian, but he couldn’t pronounce the Russian ‘sh’ and always replaced it with ‘s’ as did all the dialect speakers of the Chukotsk Peninsula. He knew who Pushkin and Nekrasov were, had been in Khabarovsk, and was an experienced traveler. He was a romantic by nature, judging by the gleam in his eye.

It was he who volunteered to lead his young friends out of confinement.

‘I told them America was closer and that we should head in that direction, but they wanted to make it to the mainland, so I gave in. We had to reach the Chukchi Eskimos, the migrating ones who were here before the Russians came. We didn’t make it.’

They were gone for only four days. They had left in the middle of September, in boots and summer clothing, certain they would have no difficulty in reaching the Chukchi camps, where Kotelnikov had assured them they would find friendship and assistance. But it snowed – a thick, early snow. Kotelnikov entered an Evenk village to buy deerskin boots. He bought the boots, and by evening a patrol caught up with them.

‘The Tungus are traitors, enemies,’ Kotelnikov fumed.

The old reindeer-driver had offered to lead Karev and Vasiliev out of the taiga without expecting any payment whatsoever. He was not particularly grieved by his new three-year ‘add-on’.

‘They’ll send me to the mines as soon as spring comes. I’ll just take off again.’

To shorten the time, he taught Karev and Vasiliev the Chukotsk language of the Kamchatka Peninsula. It was Karev, of course, who had initiated the whole affair. He cut a theatrical figure – even in this prison setting – and his modulated, velvet-toned voice betrayed his frivolousness. It couldn’t even have been called adventurousness. With each passing day he understood better the futility of the attempt, became moody, and weakened.

Vasiliev was simply a good soul ready to share his friend’s fate. Their escape attempt had taken place during the
first
year of their imprisonment, while they still had illusions… and physical strength.

Twelve cans of meat disappeared on a ‘white’ summer night from the tent-kitchen of a geological prospecting group. The loss was highly mysterious, since all forty employees and technologists were civilians with good salaries who had little need to steal cans of meat. Even if these cans had been worth some fantastic sum, there was no one to buy them in this remote, endless forest. The ‘bear’ explanation was immediately rejected, since nothing else in the kitchen had been touched. It was suggested that someone might have been trying to get even with the cook, who was in charge of the food. But the cook was a genial sort who denied that he had a secret enemy among the forty men. To check the matter out, the foreman, Kasaev, armed two of the stronger men with knives and set out with them to examine the area. He himself took with him the only weapon in camp – a small-caliber rifle. The surrounding area consisted of gray-brown ravines devoid of the slightest trace of greenery. They led to a limestone plateau. The geologist’s camp was located in a sort of pit on the green shore of a creek.

It did not take long to find out what had happened. In about two hours the party leisurely climbed a plateau, and a worker with particularly good eyesight stretched out his hand: a moving point could be made out on the horizon. The search party went along the ridge of slippery tuff, young stone that had not yet completely formed. This young tuff is similar to white butter and has a repulsive, salty taste. A man’s foot will sink into it as if into a swamp, and when a boot is dipped in this semi-liquid, buttery stone, it is covered by a white paint-like substance.

It was easy to walk along the ridge, and they caught up with the man in about an hour and a half. He was dressed in the shreds of an old pea jacket and quilted pants with the knees missing. Both pant legs had been cut off to make footwear, which had already worn to shreds. The man had also cut off the sleeves of the pea jacket to wrap around his feet. His leather or rubber boots had evidently been long since worn through on the stones and branches and had been abandoned.

The man had a shaggy beard and was pale from unendurable suffering. He had diarrhea, terrible diarrhea. Eleven untouched cans of meat lay next to him on the rocks. One can had been broken open and eaten the day before.

He had been trying to make his way to Magadan for a month and was circling in the forest like a man rowing a boat in a deep lake-fog. He had lost all sense of direction and was walking at random when, totally exhausted, he came upon the camp. He had been catching field mice and eating grass. He had managed to hold out until the previous day when he noticed the smoke of our fire. He waited for night, took the cans, and crawled up on to the plateau by morning. He also took matches from the kitchen, but there was no need for them. He ate the meat, and his dry mouth and terrible thirst forced him to descend the ravine to the creek. There he drank and drank the cold, delicious water. The next day his face was all puffed up, and a gastric cramp robbed him of his last strength. He was glad that his journey was over – no matter in what fashion.

Captured at that very same camp was another escapee, an important person of some kind. One of a group who had escaped from a neighboring mine, robbing and killing the mine director himself, this man was the last of the ten to be captured. Two were killed, seven caught, and this last member of the group was captured on the twenty-first day. He had no shoes, and the soles of his feet were cracked and bleeding. He said that he had eaten a tiny fish a week earlier. He had caught the fish in a dried-up stream, but it had taken him several hours, and he was debilitated by hunger. His face was swollen and drained of blood. The guards took considerable care with his diet and treatment. They even mobilized the camp medic and gave him strict orders to take special care of the prisoner. The man spent three days in camp, where he washed, ate his fill, got his hair cut, and shaved. Then he was taken away by a patrol for questioning, after which he was undoubtedly shot. The man knew this would happen, but he had seen a lot in the camps, and his indifference had long since reached the stage where a man becomes a fatalist and swims with the current. The guards were with him the entire time and would not permit anyone to talk to him. Each evening he would sit on the porch of the bathhouse and watch the enormous cherry-red sunset. The light of the evening sun was reflected in his eyes and they seemed to be on fire – a beautiful sight.

Orotukan is a settlement in Kolyma with a monument to Tatyana Malandin, and the Orotukan Club bears her name. Tatyana Malandin was a civilian employee, a member of the Komsomol, who fell into the clutches of escaped professional criminals. She was robbed and raped ‘in chorus’ – in the loathsome expression of the criminal world. And she was murdered in the taiga, a few hundred yards from the village. This occurred in 1938, and the authorities vainly spread rumors that she had been murdered by ‘Trotskyites’. The absurdity of such a slander, however, was too obvious, and it enraged even Lieutenant Malandin, the uncle of the murdered girl. A camp employee, Malandin henceforth reversed his attitude to the criminals and the politicals in camp. From that time on he hated the former and did favors for the latter.

Both the men described above were recaptured when their strength was virtually exhausted. Another man conducted himself quite differently when he was detained by a group of workers on a path near the test pits. A heavy rain had been falling for three days, and several workers put on their raincoats and pants to check the small tent, which served as a kitchen; it contained food and cooking utensils. There was also a portable smithy with an anvil, a furnace, and a supply of drilling tools. The smithy and kitchen stood in the bed of a mountain creek, in a ravine about a mile and a half from the sleeping tents.

Mountain rivers easily burst their banks when it rains, and the weather was fully expected to pull its usual tricks. The sight that the men came upon, however, left them totally dumbfounded. Nothing remained. Where there had been a smithy with tools for the entire site – drills, bits, picks, shovels, blacksmith tools – there was nothing. Nor was there any kitchen with the summer’s food supply. There were no pots, no dishes – nothing. The appearance of the ravine had been totally changed by new stones brought down from somewhere by the raging water. Everything had been carried off downstream, and the workers followed the river-banks for several miles, but did not find so much as a piece of iron. Much later, when the water had receded, an enameled bowl was found in the rose willows growing on the shore near the mouth of the creek. This crushed and twisted bowl filled with sand was all that was left after the storm and the spring flood.